Service Mapping discovers all application services in your organization and builds a comprehensive map of all devices, applications, and configuration profiles used in these application services.

This video provides an overview of Service Mapping on the Now Platform.

Who uses Service Mapping

Service Mapping enables IT departments of companies, organizations, and cloud companies providing platform as a service to create a service-aware view of infrastructure.

How do you use Service Mapping

A service instance is a set of interconnected applications and hosts which are configured to offer a service to the organization. Application services can be internal, like an organization email system or customer-facing, like an organization website. For example, creating financial reports through a web-based application requires a computer, web server, application server, databases, middleware, and network infrastructure. These applications and hosts are all configured to offer the service of financial reporting.

Typically, IT departments create and maintain an inventory that treats devices and applications as standalone, independent objects. Connections between the devices and applications are not included. This is usually referred to as horizontal discovery. This method does not address the biggest challenge for IT departments, which is understanding the connection and dependencies between each object.

Service Mapping maps dependencies, based on a connection between devices and applications. This method is referred to as top-down mapping. The top-down mapping helps you immediately see the impact of a problematic object on the rest of the service instance operation.

Figure 1. Comparison of horizontal and top-down mapping results

Comparison of horizontal and top-down mapping results

Application service maps show infrastructure objects and semantic connections between them. Service Mapping regenerates service instance maps regularly, to keep them updated and relevant. Any faulty objects are shown along with the devices and applications they affect, providing a visual clue of the state of the service instance.

How does Service Mapping work

Service Mapping can deploy different methods for creating application services. The main method of Service Mapping discovering and mapping devices and applications is using patterns. A pattern is a sequence of operations whose purpose is to detect attributes of devices and applications and their outbound connections. If your organization uses tags for asset management, you can use these tags to map application services. Service Mapping can also discover devices and applications by following traffic connections between them. This method is referred to as traffic-based mapping. For more information, see Choose the right method for discovery and mapping application services.

What to know before you begin

You can use Service Mapping only if the Discovery product is activated and set up.

You must define users and configure credentials to allow Service Mapping and Discovery access to applications and devices inside your organization network. For more information, see Configuring Service Mapping.

Service Mapping on the Now Platform

Service Mapping relies on Discovery and the MID Server to discover devices and applications. Service Mapping uses results of horizontal discovery performed by Discovery. The MID Server facilitates communication between Service Mapping and devices and applications it discovers.

Data collected and organized by Service Mapping is visible in Event Management, Dependency Views, and Application Portfolio Management (APM). With Event Management, you can view events to take actions for recovering your organization application services. Dependency Views shows relationships between devices and applications in the context of application services they belong to. When integrated with APM, Service Mapping provides information about components making up a business application and helps APM users to monitor business application performance.

Service Mapping supports domain separation. If your Now Platform uses domain separation, administrators and users can only see and manage application services belonging to their own domain.

To view a list of Service Mapping plugin dependencies, see Plugins or applications installed with ITOM Visibility.