Service consumers and providers

A service model relationship is a link between a component that provides a service and the components that consume that service. In a provider/consumer relationship, the provider status naturally impacts the consumer status. When you define relationships in a service model, you make it possible to know, for example, which business services are affected if Router C fails.

The concepts of provider and consumer are relative to the relationship being considered. In the following figure, Component B is a provider in one relationship and a consumer in another.

Impact (status) propagation in relationships



The service model enables a CI to be related to another CI by defining impact relationships. Such relationships state that a CI is impacted if something happens to the CIs to which it is related. For example, a group of people responsible for accounting will be impacted when the accounting database server is down.

In Atrium CMDB, service models consist of CIs related to each other via relationships of different types. Only the impact relationships are synchronized to Infrastructure Management.

Service model relationships are organized in a hierarchy of data classes in which each class represents a relationship type. 

In Atrium CMDB, the base class for component relationships is BMC_Base_Relationship. All service model relationship classes are defined in the BMC Atrium CMDB as a subclass of BMC_Base_Relationship.

Important components

Some components can be considered "important" components and can be set to propagate their priority back to their provider. For more information about priority propagators, see Designing a service model.