Service Management › Managing Service Snapshots › Set Service Snapshots as the Gold, Silver, or Bronze Standard

Set Service Snapshots as the Gold, Silver, or Bronze Standard

CA Configuration Automation enables you to designate service snapshots as the Gold, Silver, or Bronze Standard. These snapshots are used as the reference for service comparison operations.

The gold, silver, and bronze designations do not necessarily imply a hierarchy where the Gold Standard is a higher standard than the Silver Standard, and the Silver Standard is a higher standard than the Bronze Standard. While they can be implemented this way, they are designed to give you three different standards to apply to the service snapshots used as the reference for comparison operations.

To increase the flexibility, you can designate more than one service snapshot as the Gold, Silver, or Bronze Standard in the case where you want a specific component of the snapshot to be used for the comparison. For example, you could have a Gold Standard for the operating system, another Gold Standard for the database, a Bronze Standard for Linux mail servers, and another Bronze Standard for Windows mail servers.

Notes:

• Because snapshots are differentiated by timestamp and not by name, you can create multiple snapshots with same name and designate them as the Gold, Silver, or Bronze Standard.
• If you designate multiple snapshots as the Gold, Silver, or Bronze Standard, be careful when naming and creating the description of the snapshots to reflect how they are used.
• A similar snapshot feature enables you to designate one service snapshot as the Baseline—the snapshot that is used as the reference for Change Detection operations. There can be only one Baseline snapshot per service.
• The same service snapshot can be designated as the Gold, Silver, or Bronze Standard and as the Baseline.
• Gold, Silver, or Bronze Standard designations can also be made for service snapshots.

To designate service snapshots as the Gold, Silver, or Bronze Standard

1. Click the Management link.

   The Management panel appears.

2. Click the Service tab.

   The Service tab page appears.

3. Click the name of the service you want to view or edit snapshot details about in the Service table.

   The selected service's Service Details page appears and displays the Service tab.

4. Click the Snapshots tab.

   The Snapshots table appears.

5. Click the service snapshots you want to designate as the Gold, Silver, or Bronze Standard, then select one of the following options from the Select Actions drop-down list:
   • Set as Gold Standard
   • Set as Silver Standard
   • Set as Bronze Standard

   The Designation column in the Snapshots table displays Gold Standard, Silver Standard, or Bronze Standard for the corresponding snapshots. These snapshots are used when the Gold, Silver, or Bronze Standard snapshot option is selected as the source or target snapshot as described in Compare Services or Components.