Introduction to Business Services

This section describes how to use SL1 to create and manage business services for your company. Business services let you gauge the availability, health, and risk of your services and the devices that provide those services.

Business services are available as part of an SL1 Standard solution. To upgrade, contact ScienceLogic Customer Support. For more information, see https://sciencelogic.com/pricing.

Business services and IT services created in the classic SL1 user interface are not included in the new business services, and "classic" business services and IT services are not related in any way to the new business services, IT services, and device services. For more information about the classic versions, see Service Provider Utilities (formerly Business Services) and IT Services (Classic).

The following video provides a case study of using business services to diagnose and resolve service-impacting issues:

Use the following menu options to navigate the SL1 user interface:

To view a pop-out list of menu options, click the menu icon ().
To view a page containing all of the menu options, click the Advanced menu icon ().

What is a Business Service?

A business service includes one or more technical services that provide value to internal or external customers. Some examples of business services include verifying Internet access or website hosting, online banking, remote backups, and remote storage. Usually a business service includes an associated Service Level Agreement (SLA) that specifies the terms of the service.

There are two methods by which you can create business services in SL1:

Option 1:

You can create the following types of services on the Business Services page, in the following order:

Device Service. Monitors a set of related IT infrastructure components (devices) that deliver a discrete function, such as a DNS or Collector Group, or all devices in a specific region.
IT Service. Monitors a service that IT provides to your organization. An IT Service provides a way to define how a set of related Device Services work together to power a given IT service, such as a DNS plus Collector Group plus a database.
Business Service. Monitors a service your organization provides to your customers. A business service consists of one or more IT services.

The following figure shows an example of how your business services may be organized.

Option 2:

Alternatively, if you require more flexibility in modeling your business service, you can create a custom Service Model based upon how your organization defines its structure.

This option, which is also called an "N-tier" service model, uses a wizard to walk you through the process of building custom service models with multiple nested or connected service levels, each of which you can label to match the terminology used in your business. This enables you to create service hierarchies with a custom number of tiers that accurately reflect your service structures within your organization, rather than being confined to the three-tier business service/IT service/device service model.

SL1 PowerFlow users can use custom service models and the applications in the ServiceNow Configuration Management Database (CMDB) SyncPack to sync business services between SL1 and ServiceNow.

Using this method, you can create, update, or delete services in ServiceNow and it will be reflected in SL1, or vice versa.

However, services that you want to sync between the two systems must either be built entirely in ServiceNow or entirely in SL1; you cannot merge services between the two.

ScienceLogic recommends syncing services from ServiceNow into SL1 rather than building custom service models in SL1 and syncing them into ServiceNow.

For more information, see the section on Syncing Business Services.

The Business Services Page

The Business Services page displays a list of the business, IT, and device services that you have access to, as well as some basic info and the health, availability, and risk metrics for each service.

To navigate to the Business Services page, click the Business Services icon ():

These business services let you gauge the health, availability, and risk of your services or the devices that provide those services. On the Business Services page, these values display in the following format and order:

Availability: The availability of a Device Service is derived from the availability rules. This may or may not be linked to device availability. A service or device is considered unavailable if SL1 is not able to collect data from the device or service, or if a device is usable or not usable. A value of 0 means a device or service is unavailable, and a value of 1 means a device is available. Availability uses the following icons:

Health: Indicates the current status of a Device Service—for example, the rate of processing or throughput for the devices in the Device Service. Health is represented by a color-coded "severity" icon that corresponds to a numerical value between 0 and 100. In the case of SL1 CDB devices, the Rows Behind presentation objects can provide a good measure of how effectively the CDB is processing Collector data.For example, the Health value could indicate when a device is intermittently unavailable because of a power problem, thereby falling below the required level of performance. Health uses the following icons by default:

Risk: Displays a percentage value between 0 and 100 that indicates how close a service is to being in an undesirable state. The safest possible risk value is 0%, while the worst risk value is 100%. Use risk for data that is known to cause issues if left unchecked, such as critical events, swap usage, or low database logging space.

These values are computed in this order because SL1 uses Availability values to compute Health, and then uses both Availability and Health values to compute Risk.

You can define metrics for device services based on:

availability
latency
event count
event severity
device state
Dynamic Application performance data collected by SL1
collection label metrics (for example, CPU, Memory, or Swap)

NOTE: IT services created in the classic user interface are not included in the new user interface, and "classic" IT services are not related in any way to the new business services, IT services, and device services.

You can filter the items on this inventory page by typing filter text or selecting filter options in one or more of the filters found above the columns on the page. For more information, see Filtering Inventory Pages.

You can adjust the size of the rows and the size of the row text on this inventory page. For more information, see the section on Adjusting the Row Density.

The Business Services page displays the following about each service:

Favorite. The services that are favorited to display at the top of the list.
Name. The name of the service.
Description. A description of the service.
Service Type. The type of service. Values include Business Service, IT Service, Device Service, or a custom service type.
Organization. The organization that owns the service.
Contact User. The user who should be contacted with any questions about the service.
Availability. The service's current availability value.
Health. The service's current health value.
Risk. The service's current risk value.
Policy. The service policy associated with the service.
Last Updated By. The username of the user who last updated the service.
Date Updated. The date and time at which the service was last updated.
RCA Options. Indicates whether Root Cause Analysis is enabled or disabled for the service.
Contact Organization. The organization that should by contacted with any questions about the service.
Status. Indicates whether the health, availability, and risk values are calculated. This field shows "Enabled" or "Disabled".
Refresh Interval. The frequency at which health, availability, and risk values are calculated. This field is also known as the polling frequency, which is the frequency at which data is communicated between a device and another system.

Enable, Disable, or Delete a Business Service

In SL1, you can enable, disable, or delete one or more services from the Business Services page. To enable, disable, or delete one or more services, select the checkboxes of the services you want to enable, disable or delete, then select of the following action buttons you want to perform at the top of the page Delete Services, Enable, or Disable.

Alternatively, you can perform any of the actions to a single service by clicking the Actions button () for that service, and then selecting Delete Services, Enable, or Disable..

Favorite a Business Service

In SL1, you can select one or more services so that they always display at the top of the list on the Business Services page. This process is called favoriting services or favorite service.

For example, on the Business Services page pictured below, click the Favorite Service star icon () to add or remove the service from your favorites list. Click the icon () again to remove the favorite status.

You can then sort your Business Services by their favorite status.

With favorite services, you can:

View your favorite service at the top of the Business Services page by default.
Include favorites in the multi-sort function.
Filter services by favorite.

Business Service Dashboards

SL1 includes three default dashboards relating to business services on the Dashboards page ():

In addition to these default dashboards, you can also choose to create your own custom dashboards for business services. For more information, see the Creating Dashboards section.

Example: Retail Banking

Using SL1 to monitor a business service lets you quickly see whether the service is available and working as expected for a customer or end user. For example, a banking company wants to ensure that its retail banking service is available around the world. It would use the following workflow to set up its services in SL1:

Because the company has offices around the world, it creates multiple device services that organize devices based on location or region. The company adds all of its devices to the relevant device services.
The company then creates multiple IT services to monitor the device services (from step 1), including separate IT services for online banking, teller systems, and ATM networks.
Next, the company creates a business service for its retail banking business, and this business service includes all of the IT services (from step 2) that deal with retail banking.

As needed, the banking company repeats steps 1-3 to create additional business services (made up of IT services and device services ) to monitor their commercial banking and investment banking devices and services.