14 January 2015 blogs Klaas Hulder 3 min read
We recently released version 7.3 of our flagship product, Live Maps. Building on the success of service modelling introduced in May of last year, we have extended the service model to show the dependencies between services.
Core IT services such as DNS, Active Directory and SharePoint provide the foundation on which business critical applications and services are built. With Live Map dependent services feature, you can express these relationships quickly and easily. Modelling the connections between your services allows you to see at a glance whether availability and performance problems are application specific or whether they are a result of issues with your service fabric. Comprehensive service modeling allows you to drill down from problem to root cause in only a few clicks, and to prioritize your response based on business and customer impact.
Supplier and consumer services
To make clear the role a service has in a dependency relationship, we call a service that other services use a supplier service and a service that relies on other services a consumer service.
Defining dependencies between services
Using the Live Maps Authoring console it is easy to specify the dependencies between services. The service definition page includes a tab that allows you to search existing services and select any of them as dependencies.
Service Designer in Authoring Console
Service dependencies in the dashboards
Service dependency information is displayed in both the Services Dashboard and the Service Maps.
In the services dashboard we have added a new column that shows the aggregate health state of all the supplier services (we use a ‘worst-of’ algorithm). Note that while we display the health state of the supplier services, we don’t change the health state of the consuming service based on the suppliers. Often a consuming service can continue to run when one of its suppliers is experiencing an issue so you will only see the health state of the consumer change if the consumer itself is unable to function. However, by looking at the supplier column, you will receive a heads-up that your service may be impacted by a supplier in the future. This allows you to proactively respond before you experience outages.
Service Dashboard in Operations and Web Console
As always, the services dashboard is sorted to bring the services that need the most attention to the top of the list. With the addition of dependent services, we can now intelligently sort core, fabric services to the top of the list when they experience issues. This allows you to quickly determine and respond to the root of application issues when multiple problems have a single cause.
In the Service Map we have added a new tab called ‘Related Services’. Here you can find a list of supplier and consumer services with their health states.
Service Map in Operations and Web Console.
If you are already a Live Maps V7 customer you can download Live Maps V7.3 now. If you’re not a Live Maps customer or you only have a license for our standard edition and you want to add business service management to your System Center implementation, please contact our sales engineers for a demo or further information.
