Determining a CI's relationship and dependencies

To understand the impact of different CIs and their status on a service, identify the underlying dependencies and relationships within the IT systems.

• Consider relationships and dependencies within the IT service, for example, within email service, or call support's dependency on email.
• Consider dependencies on other services, for example, web services and email services.
• Consider how the same IT components might support more than one service, for example, one server hosting multiple applications.
• Consider the dependencies of several business processes on the same service, for example, email used by all.
• Consider the relationship between IT services and business processes (the link called business service).

Map business processes to each system. The grouping of IT systems becomes the IT services, so that only one IT service would exist for each business process.

Identify the relationships and dependencies among the IT components and the logical components to one another. The direction of the relationship is important. If a system CI is to be linked to a hardware CI, the hardware CI must be the provider and the system CI the consumer.

Examine how the various resources combine to deliver a service on a particular host. Define the resources that are providers and the resources that consume their services in the service delivery stream.