About Service Mapping
The core of Service Mapping gives the ability to see what CI’s support a business service and how the CI’s are related. Service Mapping creates a service oriented CMDB.
Benefits of having Service Mapping:
ITSM space: In a single pane of glass, Service mapping provides visibility to services, get an understanding of the impacted CI’s on your business services and improve Incident & Change process
ITOM space: It helps Agents, Ops team to prioritize the tickets based on application services and work proactively as opposed to reactively on the issues that might impact a business service
Say when an Email is down, the customer will raise a ticket saying the same, they might not be aware as to which server or database is actually impacted.
3. SecOps space: It helps to understand which applications are customer facing and operators can prioritize vulnerabilities.
Configuration item, data into CMDB can be ingested using different sources like discovery or any 3rd party tool
Service Mapping can be implemented for customers in many approaches:
1. Tag based service mapping for cloud native/container laden and virtual machines environment
2. Top Down service mapping, can be used for on prem and legacy applications
3. ML based service mapping [Process and Traffic based], discovery will learn the pattern over the time and suggests the mapping
In Top Down Service Mapping[for On Prem/Legacy applications] following steps are carried out:
- Mid Server, set up is done and kept active, which will run horizontal discovery and will populate CI’s within CMDB table
- Set up an entry point for Creation of Application service via Service Mapping in ServiceNow
- Keep the Discovery schedules within Service mapping view is active and runs regularly to make sure the applications created by Service mapping have proper CI’s associated
Video reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aainoQ1qTRY
Example:
Discovery of application via Service Mapping
Running an application like Google.com involves the following key technical components:
- DNS Servers: Translate domain names to IP addresses.
Browser Request: A user enters “google.com” in their web browser and presses Enter.
DNS Resolution: The browser sends a request to a DNS (Domain Name System) server to resolve the domain name “google.com” into an IP address.
2. Load Balancers: Distribute incoming traffic across multiple servers to manage load efficiently.
3. Web Servers: Handle and process incoming HTTP requests, generating appropriate responses.
4. Application Servers: Execute application logic, often using frameworks and runtime environments.
5. Databases: Store and retrieve structured data necessary for processing requests (e.g., search index).
6. Caching Mechanisms: Improve performance by storing frequently accessed data temporarily (e.g., Redis, Memcached).
7. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs): Distribute content globally to reduce latency and ensure fast delivery to users.
8. Client Browsers: Render HTML, CSS, and execute JavaScript to display web pages and enable user interactions.
Infrastructure:
- Data Centers: Google operates numerous data centers worldwide, housing the necessary hardware and network infrastructure.
- Cloud Services: Utilize scalable cloud computing resources to dynamically handle varying loads and ensure high availability.
With Service Mapping, when given with an application URL, the system can discover its underlying technical components by top down discovery approach and can create application service in servicenow with its dependent CI’s.
