Service and Application Modeling - Documentation for Bmc Helix Discovery
Business Services, Business Applications, and Technical Servicesbusiness Service, Business Application, and Technical Service Are Key Components of Application...
Business Services, Business Applications, and Technical Services
Business Service, Business Application, and Technical Service are key components of application modeling. It’s essential to understand these components to fully understand what the model represents:
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Business Service | A Business Service is functionality offered to end users or customers. If you ask your end users or customers what services they use, the things they name are the Business Services. Examples are services like “Commodities Trading” and “Holiday Booking” that are used by internal users, or “Shopping Cart” and “Order History” that would be used by external customers of a retail organization. In most cases, a single Business Service is used by many different end users or customers. There would be just one “Order History” service for all customers, or perhaps one per region, but certainly not one per customer. |
| Business Application | Business Application is essentially a synonym of Business Service. It is also defined as a service offered to end users or customers. Business Applications can be used to represent a hierarchy, where an overall Service has several distinct end-user Applications within it. For example, the “Corporate Communication” Business Service could be composed of Business Applications “Email”, “Instant Messaging”, “Video Conferencing” and so on. Note that the Business Applications are still end-user applications that non-technical users would recognize, not the underlying technical building blocks like databases, message buses and web servers that they are built from. |
| Technical Service | A Technical Service is maintained by IT, and provides shared functionality that is used by multiple Business Services. These are not the services or applications that end users see, rather the infrastructure upon which they are built, and that are managed by particular groups within IT. Examples are services such as “Oracle Database Servers in London”, “Santa Clara Edge Switches”, and “Kubernetes Cluster ABC”. |
Business Services of course depend on facilities provided by Technical Services, but not in a simple blanket manner. For example, many Business Services would make use of databases that are managed as part of the “London Oracle Databases” Technical Service. If one database fails, it must be fixed by a member of the “London Oracle Databases” technical support team, but the failure probably only affects one particular Business Service, not all the Business Services that use any of the other databases in the Technical Service. The Business Services affected are likely to have an influence on the priority of handling a failure – fixing a database that is part of “Commodities Trading” is probably a higher priority than fixing one that is part of “Holiday Booking”.
BMC Helix Discovery automatically finds and connects most parts of most business services, business applications, and technical services, so modeling a service or application is a matter of providing business context to the information within BMC Helix Discovery.
Service models are a collection of all the nodes and relationships that represent the current parts of the service, plus information used by BMC Helix Discovery to keep the model up to date.
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Modeling services by using blueprints
The blueprint modeling approach provides complete control of the service composition. You can add static content (nodes) and dynamic content (rules in blueprints) to control the model composition.
See Service modeling with blueprints for more information.
Elena Rostova holds a Master's degree in Public Health Journalism. She covers groundbreaking medical research, holistic wellness trends, mental health awareness, and nutritional science.
