Dependency views

In this section, we will near about the importance of dependency views.

Maps like the preceding one are becoming so important in everyday life; imagine a world without GPS devices or electronic maps.

There are also hard copies of the maps that were available everywhere for us to get from place to place. There are also special maps to the utilities and other public service agencies to be able to identify the impact of digging a tunnel or a water pipe or an underground electric cable. These maps help them to identify the impact of making a change to the ground.

Maps also helps us to understand the relationships between states, countries, cities, and streets with different set of information in real time that includes real-time traffic information showing accident information, any constructions, and so on.

Dependency views is similar to real life navigation maps; they provide a map of relationships between the IT Infrastructure components and the business services that are defined under the scope. Unlike the real-time traffic updates on the maps the dependency views show real-time active incidents, change, and problems reported on an inpidual configuration item or an infrastructure component.

Changes frequently happen in the environment. Some of the changes are handled with a legacy knowledge of how the inpidual components are connected to the business services through the service mapping plugin down to the inpidual component level. Making a change without understanding the relationships between each IT infrastructure component might adversely affect the service levels and impact the business service.

ServiceNow dependency views provide a snapshot of how the underlying business service is connected to inpidual Configuration Item (CI) elements. A configuration item is referred to as tangible or intangible infrastructure component or an element that might include Infrastructure components, process, procedures etc. Drilling down to the inpidual CI elements provides a view of associated service operations and service transition data that includes incidents logged against a given CI, any underlying problem reported against the given CI, and also changes associated with the given CI.

Dependency views provides a graphical view of configuration items and their relationships. The dependency views provide a view of the CI and their relationships; in order to get a perspective from a business stand point you will need to enable the service mapping plugin.

Having a detailed view of how the inpidual CI components are connected from the Business service to the CI components compliments change management, making it possible to perform effective impact analysis before any changes are made to the respective CI:

Image source: wiki.ServiceNow.com

A dependency map starts with a root node, which is usually termed as a root CI that is grayed out with a gray frame. Relationships start building up and they map from the upstream and downstream dependencies of the infrastructure components that are scoped to discover by the ServiceNow auto discovery. Administrators have control of the number of levels displayed the dependency maps.

It is also easy to manage maps that allow creating or modifying existing relationships right from the map that posts the respective changes to the CMDB automatically.

Each of the CI component of the dependency maps has an indicator that shows any active and pending issues against a CI; this includes any incidents, problems, changes, and any events associated with the respective configuration item.

Dependency maps can also be created manually by creating CI and creating relationships between them to create dependency maps.