Services and service topology

A service is a logical group of applications, middleware, security, storage, networks, and other subservices 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. A few advantages of defining a service are listed in the following section:

Enables you to efficiently manage the underlying applications and infrastructure relevant to your business.
Provides an option to track the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) associated with the service.

In the BMC Helix Service Monitoring console, you can view services from the components, which are integrated with BMC Helix Portal. For more information, see Data-providers-for-BMC-Helix-Service-Monitoring.

Service entities

A service contains entities. The following list represents a few entity types:

Device
Host
Database
Another service
Computer application

The health of a service depends on the health of its entities. For example, a JIRA management service contains entities such as Incident Management, Change Management, Web server, and a database. If the Change Management system is down or its performance is highly impacted, the JIRA management service is also impacted. In a service model, each service entity is referred to as a Configuration Item (CI).

Note

Service entities and Configuration items are interchangeably used in BMC Helix Service Monitoring.

Impacted entities and Impacted CIs in BMC Helix Service Monitoring

Impacted Entities on the service details page displays the top 3 impacted business services that are part of the main impacted service. In the following example, BMC Banking Application and Banking Core Servers are the top impacted business services that are part of the BMC Financial Service business service. Impacting Events shows the number of open events impacting the services.

Impacted entities.png

Impacted CIs

Impacted CIs on the Services page displays the total count of impacted CIs associated with a service. In the following example, there are 4 impacted CIs that are associated with the Andy test service.

Service topology

A service topology is a graphical representation that shows a dynamic and pictorial view of a service model. In BMC Helix Service Monitoring, the service topology is displayed in the Topology tab of the service details page. The following image is an example of a service topology:

The nodes in the service topology are represented using different symbols. A few examples are listed in the following table. Click a node to view its details.
Symbol
Description
Business service
Software Instance
Host
The nodes in the service topology are color-coded according to their impact severity:
The service topology also shows the direction of the impact flow among the service nodes. In the preceding example, the pd-02 host is critically impacted and its impact is flowing to the aiops_automation1 business service through both the VMware Tools and BladeLogic software instances.