Modeling services by using service blueprints
Service blueprints are predefined, rule-based service templates or building blocks that you can reuse to create multiple services. Benefits of service blueprints include:
Customer success: A Fortune 500 finance company significantly reduces service model creation time by using service blueprints
An IT infrastructure team at a Fortune 500 finance company created a service topology by using blueprints and achieved the following results:
- Reduced the time required to create a service topology from hours to minutes.
- Freed up the service designers for other high-priority tasks because they could reuse blueprints to create multiple service topologies.
- Improved operational efficiency and decision-making capabilities. With blueprints, the topology creation process is automated and all the relevant connections of a host are identified and mapped accurately from the infrastructure.
Workflow
Task | Product | Role | Action | Reference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
1. | BMC Helix Discovery | Service designer | Create the service blueprint that includes the required components. | |
2. | BMC Helix Discovery | Service designer | Create a service model by using the blueprint. |
How does the IT team use service blueprints to create service models?
The IT team uses the BluePrint Host-to-Service blueprint in BMC Helix Discovery to create multiple service models such as Finance Management and Cloud Services Management. This blueprint starts with a host node. However, service designers can start with any other node when creating blueprints.
Blueprint
The blueprint contains a traversal map of nodes starting from host to network device that is required to build an end-to-end service topology. By providing only the Host name, the IT team retrieves the entire topology of that service from the IT infrastructure.
Blueprint rules and dynamic updates
The blueprint rules synchronize the data across the service topology dynamically whenever there is a change in the configuration. As shown in the following blueprint, a Hosted Software rule that is defined on the Host and Cluster link populates the topology with only those clusters that are running as software that hosts the Host. If the cluster on which the Host is hosted is replaced by another cluster, the CI topology of the service is updated dynamically.
CI topology
The IT team created the Sales Tax service as a child service to the Finance Management service by using the Blueprint Host-to-Service blueprint. Then, they reused the blueprint to create another child service Income Tax, saving the time and effort required to create the services individually.
The following figure shows the CI topology of the Sales Tax service created for the Host for which the name was provided as input. Other connections for that host are identified and mapped from the infrastructure automatically.
The following figure shows the topology of the Incident Management service created for the Host for which the name was provided as input. The content and hierarchy are different from the Sales Tax service topology even though the same blueprint is used for both services because the related connections are different for this host in the infrastructure.
Service model
The IT team created the following service model for the Retail-Outlet service, which has many child services like ShoppingCart, Catalog, Inventory, and Pricing. ShoppingCart has Database as a child service, and Database has Oracle-Dev and Oracle-Prod as child services.
