This recipe shows how to create a business service within Service Manager. A business service is a collection of information relating to an IT service such as an e-mail system, a payroll system, or other line of business service. The information about the service consists of information such as the components that make up the service (servers, databases, and websites) and properties such as availability of the service, affected users, and owner information, for example.
You can either manually create a business service, in which case review the Manually creating CIs recipe, or you can have them synchronized with information relating to distributed applications from within Operations Manager, in which case review and set up the Operations Manager CI Connector as shown in the recipe within this chapter.
This recipe will show how to create a business service based on a distributed application. Before attempting this recipe, you will need a distributed application and save it to the management pack.
You will also need all the management packs that contain items that your distributed application references, such as SQL and IIS.
The following steps will guide you through the process of creating a business service within Service Manager:
- Within Operations Manager, export the management pack containing the distributed application that you want to create as a business service.
- Within the Service Manager console, navigate to Administration | Management Packs.
- On the task pane on the right-hand side of the console, click on Import.
- On the Select Management Packs to Import screen, navigate to the management pack you exported earlier, select it, click on Open, and then click on Import.
- If the import fails, review the error details and it most likely will reference a management pack that the one you are trying to import relies on. If so, repeat the import process, but navigate to the required management pack and import that first before the one containing your distributed application.
- Once you have the management pack imported, navigate in the Service Manager console to | Administration | Connectors.
- Select the Operations Manager CI Connector, and in the task pane click on Properties.
- In the Edit screen, on the left-hand side, click on Management Packs, and then click on Refresh.
- Enter the password for the account used by the Operations Manager CI Connector and click on OK.
- In the management packs list, select the new management packs you imported and click on OK.
- With the Operations Manager CI connector selected, click on Synchronize Now in the task pane.
- Navigate in the Service Manager console to | Configuration Items | All Business Services.
- Your distributed application should now be displayed under All Business Services.
- Select your business service and click on Edit on the task pane on the right-hand side.
- From the form screen that opens you can add additional information such as availability, operational status, owner, and affected users, as well as view the components that make up the business service as defined within Operations Manager as your distributed application.
Service Manager uses the information in the exported management pack, from Operations Manager to create the business service CI. The business service definition in Service Manager matches the distributed application in Operations Manager due to the use of this shared management pack.
The business services are great for storing information related to a service so they're available when creating work items, but they can also be used to automatically raise incidents.
By default, Service Manager will not connect related incidents raised from Operations Manager to Business Services. For example, an alert about a database being offline that is part of a business service will not add the business service as a related item to the incident.
This can be enabled, but it requires the alert to be generated with the same name as the business service. This requires some planning and the use of rollup monitors in the related Operations Manager instance.