Blog

Service Mapping

What is Service Mapping?

"ServiceNow Service Mapping has an innovative, “top-down” approach to discovering and mapping the relationships between IT components that comprise specific business services, even in dynamic, virtualized environments. "

ServiceNow Information site for ServiceWatch

How is this different than ServiceNow Discovery?

ServiceNow Discovery uses a "bottom-up" approach to discovery.  With ServiceNow Discovery, you setup credentials and IP Range sets to discover CIs and some relationships based on those IP Ranges upward.

ServiceNow Service Mapping uses a "top-down" approach.  You setup an Business Service "entry point" such as an url and it traverses down from that entry point to discover the CIs and relationships for that business service.

How does Service Mapping help you?

Typically Business Service to CI relationships are maintained manually as they are not discovered.  The issue with these manual relationships is that as you soon as you are finished creating them, they quickly become out-of-date.

ServiceNow Service Mapping uses a top down approach to discovery.  By using this approach, you can specify a Business Service entry point and find all the CI and relationships underneath. 

obstacles to Service Mapping SETUP

  1. Mid Server install.  In order to discover CI and relationship information with Service Mapping.
  2. Entry Point Setup. With traditional ServiceNow Discovery, you setup IP Ranges and credentials. and it if they are configured correctly, it will discover your CIs.  With Service Mapping, you need to know what entry point type to use and what entry point parameters to use for each business service to discover.  You have to also setup IP ranges on the collector. It is more detail-oriented than ServiceNow Discovery in my opinion.
  3. Collector Setup.  Collectors have xml files that say what IP ranges to use and what data to send to Service Mapping and ServiceNow.  Unlike ServiceNow discovery, where you configure these details within ServiceNow,  you need to login to a server and configure these xml files.  Setup of collectors is dependent on your ServiceNow version

All about the Business Services

Usage of Service Mapping all depends on your usage of business services.  If your business services are used in ServiceNow or wanted to be used, this can have a lot of benefit.  Manually setting up the relationship between CIs and Business Services is a really maintenance intensive and error prone process.   Being able to automate those relationships can save a lot of time and increase accuracy.