Building service models

A service is a logical group of entities or configuration items (CIs) that work together to achieve a comprehensive, end-to-end business goal. HR service, admin service, and payroll service are a few examples of business services. Additionally, these entities can be applications, middleware, security, storage, networks, services belonging to an instrumented application, and other subservices that support a business goal.

A well-defined service offers the following advantages:

It helps you to efficiently manage the underlying applications and infrastructure relevant to your business.
It provides an option to track the associated Key Performance Indicators.

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, business application, and technical service 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 could be supported by Amazon Web Services, 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 could be 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.

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 and Creating-service-models.
BMC Helix Discovery services: This modeling approach provides you an option to define services in BMC Helix Discovery, and view and add those services in BMC Helix AIOps while creating service models. For more information, see Service and application modeling.
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 Discovery. For more information, see Publishing groups as service models.

Service model design considerations

Building a service model can be a daunting task. When you begin with the process, it might be helpful to identify one critical business service in an application, identify dependencies of the service, and build a complete service model for that part of the application.

Understanding how various CIs in a business service interact with each other helps you build other related services and design your service model. In addition, it helps you understand how services are dependent on each other, which in turn helps you decide the hierarchy of services in the service model.

For example, if you are in the retail business, one of the applications in your organization can be the order processing application. This application consists of several services. From the list of services, you might identify that your billing and payment service depends on the database that stores information about the products offered to the customers through the application. The billing and payment service also depends on the network that enables communication between various CIs. Also, the database and network are not dependent on each other. Therefore, you might want to build a separate service for each of them. Because the billing and payment service is impacted by the database and network services, you can add database and network as the child services of the billing and payment service.

The following figure shows an example of a service model with a top-level service, Order Processing with its child services, which includes the Billing & Payment service. The Billing & Payment service is further dependent on its child services. The arrow lines between the services represent the direction of the impact relationship between services. For example, the Billing & Payment service is impacted by the changes in the Retail-AWS, Database, Mainframe, and Network services.

Example of a service model

Data sources for services

BMC Helix AIOps interacts with the following BMC and third-party products to gather CI data for services:

BMC Helix Discovery
Sources supported by BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations

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	Understanding-service-health-score
Learn about service blueprints and their usage	Understanding-service-blueprints
Use out-of-the-box blueprints to create services	Using-out-of-the-box-blueprints
Learn how to create your own service blueprints	Creating-service-blueprints
Learn how to create service models	Creating-service-models