Where do folks see integration and broker service offerings fitting into the CSDM?

[edannenb]

We have several orphan application CI's in our CMDB. They are mostly integration or broker service offerings. Where do folks see them fitting into a CSDM scheme?

[CasperJT]

Hi,

I agree, there really isn't much guidance around it in the materials already made available.

We have created a separate class for, what we call 'Integration Scenarios'. These are generally SAP PO related and have been set up as a 'part of' our SAP PO environment (Application Service), but receive data from and send data to other application services (be it SAP, ServiceNow or even external recipients).

Now, where we haven't decided yet, is whether to consider these Integration Scenarios as offerings or applications. I see benefits to both.

1. As an offering, the scenario can be directly related to the business capability it supports
2. As an application the integration scenario can be managed by a technical offering (in our case either b2b or app2app)

Now reading from the CSDM whitepaper
"An application is any deployed program or module that is designed to provide specific functionality on a compute infrastructure."
Whereas
"Service offerings (SO) consist of one or more service commitments that uniquely define the level of service in terms of availability, scope, and pricing, and other factors."

To me, an integration can fit the definition of an application in terms of delivering specific functionality. At the same time, depending on how you want to treat them (i.e. do you define specific service levels for your integrations), then you may want to treat them as Offerings.

"Luckily" for me, we will not be upgrading to New York until early 2020, so we have some time to see what others do, before migrating.

Br, Casper

[Stig Brandt1]

If you have orphan CI's in the CMDB, you will not have any service agreement attach to it, whether it is a application support, monitoring, so imo all CI's should always be linked to at least ONE Service Offering record.

[Animesh Kar]

Based on my understanding of CSDM 3.0, an interface must be represented as an application service CI. Only then it can have a 'sends data to' relationship with the source and destination systems that are also represented as application service CIs.

Of course there is the option to represent underlying infrastructure that does the 'interfacing' eg. web api, windows process, file transfer etc. as records in cmdb_ci_appl or one of its child tables. 

If we store the interface in the cmdb_ci_appl then csdm only recommends use of depends on relationship type between application service and application ci, which is a bit of a limitation.