Business services, applications, business drivers, and service pools

The Business Services view functionality provides a consolidated summary of all business services in your infrastructure. You can drill down into specific business services and view the associated applications, business drivers, service pools, and deployment details. This information helps you analyze the capacity at the service pool or deployment level.

Business services and applications

Services represent the various functionalities that organizations provide to customers. Customers consume these services to achieve various goals. The IT resources in organizations, such as compute, memory, storage, and network work together to support the services, such as email, messaging, and web hosting provided to customers.

A business service is any value-added service that is delivered to customers. The example of a value-added service is professional services that are offered by lawyers and financial planners. Sometimes, the business service consists entirely of an IT service, such as an eCommerce website for delivering goods to customers. In IT organizations, business services are supported by different components, such as servers, applications, and databases.

An application performs a specific business function within a business service. It contains multiple technology tiers, such as web, app, and database.

You can define the associations of business services with the underlying IT infrastructure to build the business service models. These models show the mapping that represents the IT resources and the dependent business services. When these models are aligned with the data that the BMC Helix Continuous Optimization collects, assessing the health of business services from the capacity perspective becomes easy.

Business drivers

A business driver represents the load processed by an application, and is a consequence of the application's business purpose. For example, a bank's website can be characterized by the number of pages accessed by the users and by the number of web banking transactions. Business drivers represent the users' behavior, and selecting the most appropriate business drivers is key to the capacity planning process.

Service pools

A service pool is a group of resources that form an infrastructure or technology layer (tier) within an application or a business service. The example of such resources is all the virtual machines that are used for the database functions. The service pool resources contribute to the same part of the workload and hence they are sized together. This aggregated sizing for service pools helps you to more precisely plan and manage your capacity needs.

Service pools consume the services from providers. For instance, virtual machines consume the services that are provided by hosts. In this case, a host is a provider and a virtual machine is a consumer.

For cloud and on-premises, you can configure your systems to add one more layer in the service model called service pools. You need to explicitly create the service pools.

Deployments in Kubernetes are conceptually similar to service pools; therefore, deployments are used in the service model and view as is. You need not create service pools for Kubernetes as deployments are directly available when you import the Kubernetes data.

Role of service pools in the capacity analysis

When you analyze the capacity at the service pool level, you can size your infrastructure more accurately and precisely. The image shows the example of the Online Shopping Portal business service and hierarchy of business service, applications, service pools, and deployments.

In the Online Shopping Portal example, to meet future demand, you might make incorrect capacity-related change, such as increasing servers for database, when you really need more servers for web. With service pools, you can easily and accurately identify the area where additional resources are required based on usage or risk indicators for these service pools.

Example hierarchy of business service, applications, service pools,
and deployments for the Online Shopping Portal business service

Correlation between entities used in the Business Services view

The Business services view provides the supported growth of business drivers that are associated with business services. The extent to which a business driver can grow depends on the resources that are allocated to the pools that run the business service. These business service resources are dependent on the underlying infrastructure that is used to run the service. The infrastructure can be a virtualized platform such as VMware or a containerized platform such as Kubernetes.

Resources at the service pool or deployment level are correlated with the business driver metrics. This correlation is used to forecast growth. For example, the growth in the business driver such as page views is decided based on the available resources at the pool level. The resource consumption changes according to the changes in page views as they are correlated. The growth that is forecasted at the pool level is then aggregated to the business service by considering the CPU, memory, and storage resources.

Workflow for setting up and using the Business Services view

Use the Business Services view to analyze the business services and drill down into service pools or deployments to perform a problem investigation. After you install the view and import business services and applications data, you can access this view from the Views tab to create service pools and start analyzing the data.