Managing Services

Services are the core services "umbrellas" provided by an IT department such as Email, Network, Enterprise Apps, or Printing. Most organizations will have no more than 5 to 8 "umbrellas".

Best Practice

The goal is to build an easy to understand service catalog and that begins with an easy to understand service offering. Try not to create a labrynth of services and instead think of these as umbrellas, or Lines of Service. The service catalog stays simple and intuitive this way.

For example: You could have a service called "Enterprise Applications". This service would contain within it all the Enterprise apps as CI.

Example: Enterprise Applications linked to Enterprise Application Service

Structured like this, the only service action needed for the Self Service Portal then would be an Software Request that has a CI Search field (multi or single select) allowing the users to select the enterprise Application(s) needed.

Adding a Service

Before you start

You must have CMDB Item New selected in the CMDB Items tab of your Configuration Management security role.

Display New Item in Wrapper must be selected in the CMDB Item Type Details window for the Service CMDB Type.

1. Display a blank Service Details window in any of the following ways.

   • Select Menu and then New. From the submenu, select Service .

   • Select Menu and then New. From the submenu, select CMDB Item... and select Service as the CMDB Item Type. Use this option if the item type does not appear in the New submenu, you want to create a service from a template, or create a subtype of the services listed as default.

   • Use the Add New button in the CMDB Item Search window.

2. Complete the details about the service.

3. Link the Service Actions to the service.

4. You must link service actions to a service in order to use them.

5. Link other CMDB Items to the service.

6. Select Ok to save the details, or Save New to save the details and display a blank details window, ready for you to create another CMDB item.

Service Details Explorer Options

The Service Details Explorer appears on the left-hand side of the Service Details window. It contains options or links to other windows and functionality that relate to the Service.

The following options are available:

Select	To...
Agreements	view all the agreements where the service is specified in the agreement selection criteria
Availability	view or set Availability Settings for the service
Impact Criteria	specify the criteria that will be used to apply an outage to a service when CMDB items impacting it are experiencing an outage
Clone	copy a service in order to create a new one
Object	attach objects or files from Windows applications to the service
Attributes	type data into categories set up in the Administration module
Service Default Form	capture general, non-reportable, non-searchable information about the service
Audit	view an audit trail of the changes made to the details of the service
Version History	view the history of the service action, including relevant changes to each version of the service
Depreciation	view the depreciation information for the service
Linking	display a graphical view of the other CMDB items which are linked to the service
Components	display a graphical view of the components for a container service
Call Search	to display the Call Search window, where you can view all open calls logged against the service
Request Search	to display the Request Search window, where you can view all open requests logged against the service
External Resources	view external resources such as directory server users linked to the service
Discrepancy Reports	outstanding CMDB Resource Reports (reports to be reviewed) linked to the entity

Updating a Service

You update service details in the same way as you would update any CMDB item.

Deleting a Service

You delete a service in the same way as you would delete any CMDB item.

You can restore deleted CMDB items if you wish.