Understanding Business Services in Service Manager

In System Center we make heavy use of Business Services, because this is how we represent the deliverables of IT to the business.  In System Center Service Manager, we have the opportunity to articulate these services through the business service listing, providing valuable information across all areas of IT.   Let’s consider “what is a service?”.  Think of it as something that IT delivers to the business in the way the business understands it.   Intranet, email, voice, warehouse automation would be examples of a service consumed by the business and delivered by IT.

We know that different persons within the IT department are going to want to know different things, as in this slide I used from MMS, we describe that around our business services, we need both strategic and operational knowledge.  Check out the data around the service that provides visibility into the service at an aggregate level, across many service management functions.

In System Center Service Manager and Operations Manager we leverage the concept of the service.  In Service Manager we articulate the service in our Business Service listing in the CMDB.  In my example, you can see several individual services, each of which are listed with a different function, priority, etc.

As we open a service, such as Active Directory, you can see how we’ve included detailed contact, priority, and business information.  This is also the place where we’re aggregating individual incidents, service tickets, change requests, releases, and risks.  We can use this aggregate information in decision making, as well as operations such as approvals (a blog for another day). 

Also note that the configuration of this service from Operations Manager is synchronized into Service Manager, making up one model, from which we can manage changes as Operations Manager automatically detects them.  The reason why is because both Service Manager and Operations Manager share the same management pack structure.  The Business Services in Service Manager are the same as the Distributed Applications in Operations Manager.  Here is the view of that data in Operations Manager:

…and in Service Manager. (showing the same configuration)

You can see how this information is super-valuable.  It allows us to manage our efforts, configuration, and costs around an individual service.  This provides the visibility, such as through a scorecard, that IT Directors never had before.  It also provides the information to IT Analysts, who want to know the configuration of a business service.  Finally, it aids in automations, being used in approvals, releases, and service offerings. 

We also see the changes to the service and the associated work items tracked and logged in the history.  You can see in my case that I’ve been using Service Requests to automatically add Active Directory users and that the requests have been associated to my Active Directory business service.

 I hope this provides a new look at how to articulate your world within System Center!  In the next post we’ll talk about how you synchronize management packs and distributed applications from Operations Manager into Service Manager.

You can also learn more about this concept by listening to our MMS session:

http://blog.concurrency.com/infrastructure/top-10-production-experiences-with-service-manager-and-orchestrator/

Nathan Lasnoski