Building service models
Service modeling in BMC Helix AIOps
A service model is a visualization of services and the relationships between various logical components or CIs. The model provides business context to the information within the service and is presented in hierarchies that can consist of elements, geographical sites, or other business resources.
Business services, technical services, and business applications
Business service, technical service, and business applications are key components of service modeling. It’s essential to understand these components to fully understand what the model represents.
Term | Definition |
|---|---|
Business service | A Business service is functionality offered to end users or customers. If you ask your end users or customers what services they use, the things they name are the business services. Examples are services like Commodities Trading and Holiday Booking that are used by internal users, or Shopping Cart and Order History that would be used by external customers of a retail organization. In most cases, a single Business Service is used by many different end users or customers. There would be just one Order History service for all customers, or perhaps one per region, but certainly not one per customer. |
Technical service | A technical service is maintained by IT, and provides shared functionality that is used by multiple business services. These are not the services or applications that end users see, rather the infrastructure upon which they are built, and that are managed by particular groups within IT. For example, the Order Processing business service is supported by Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform, and Exchange Server technical services. |
Business application | A business application is an application instance that enables a technical service. One technical service can be enabled by one or more business application instances. For example, the Exchange Server technical service is enabled by the Exchange Server Prod and Exchange Server Test business application instances. |
Business services of course depend on facilities provided by technical services, but not in a simple blanket manner. For example, many business services would make use of databases that are managed as part of the “London Oracle Databases” technical service. If one database fails, it must be fixed by a member of the “London Oracle Databases” technical support team, but the failure probably only affects one particular business service, not all the Business Services that use any of the other databases in the technical service. The business services affected are likely to have an influence on the priority of handling a failure – fixing a database that is part of “Commodities Trading” is probably a higher priority than fixing one that is part of “Holiday Booking”.
BMC Helix AIOps automatically finds and connects most parts of most business services, business applications, and technical services, so modeling a service or application is a matter of providing business context to the information within BMC Helix AIOps.
Sample service model
Service models are a collection of all the nodes and relationships that represent the current parts of the service, plus information used by BMC Helix AIOps to keep the model up to date.
For example, an Order Processing service at Apex Global can consist of the following services: Packaging, Storage, Order Request, Shipping, and Billing & Payment. The Billing & Payment service can be subdivided into functional services such as Database, Network, Mainframe, and Retail-AWS.
BMC Helix AIOps supports multiple ways to build service models depending on the logical constructs that you want to build to support your business:
- Service blueprints: This modeling approach gives you complete control of the service composition. Modeling services using service blueprints has the distinct advantage of adding rule-based dynamic content to control the model composition. For more information, see Understanding-service-blueprints.
- Start anywhere modeling: This modeling approach allows you to choose an entry point into a business application or business service and begin modeling from there.
Groups as services: This modeling approach provides you an option to define groups in BMC Helix Operations Management that can be published as service models. Because each group is a logical collection of monitored entities in BMC Helix Operations Management, you can model a group as a business service, publish it, and monitor it in BMC Helix AIOps and BMC Helix Platform. For more information, see Publishing groups as service models.
Learn more
Learn about the service health score, service blueprints, services, and service models by using the topics listed in the following table:
Action | Reference |
|---|---|
Learn about service health and how it is computed | |
Learn about service blueprints and their usage | |
Use out-of-the-box blueprints to create services | |
Learn how to create your own service blueprints | |
Learn how to create service models |