Understanding Service Modeling › Service Modeling Terminology and Concepts › Service Discovery

Service Discovery

Service Discovery is a CA SOI connector that publishes its data to CA SOI as an ordinary connector running in CA SOI Integration Services. You can use a wizard to define policies that automatically create and maintain services and relationships between source and target CIs according to specified criteria. Service Discovery searches the Persistent Store of all the data that is collected from connectors for CIs that match the policy criteria you define. Service Discovery then creates services and relationships using those CIs.

Service Discovery runs as a part of Integration Services as a connector. The Service Discovery connector appears on the Administration Pages panel among other connectors and the connector can be started or stopped from here.

You can install the Service Discovery connector on the same computer as CA SOI Integration Services and the SA Manager or on a different computer. It is possible to have only one Service Discovery connector in the whole CA SOI solution.

Service Discovery is useful when:

• You want to maintain a collection of CIs that share common qualities.
• Some areas of your enterprise are constantly changing, and you want to maintain a service dynamically without having constantly to add CIs manually.
• Certain relationships occur repeatedly in your enterprise, and manually establishing those relationships would take a significant amount of time.

The following policy types are available:

Note: Service Discovery policies support USM-Core CIs.

Dynamic service policy

Automatically discovers CIs matching specified USM types and attribute criteria and places them under a specified service.

Relationship policy

Automatically creates relationships that are based on source and target CI types and match criteria.

Unmanaged relationship policy

Discovers unmanaged relationships and creates managed relationships (with the same source and target CIs) based on the specified filtering criteria match and whether the source CI is part of the service.

Note: A subservice does not automatically inherit the scope of the parent service. If you want to scope an Automatic Relationship or Unmanaged Relationship policy to a parent service and any of the parent's child services, you must explicitly add the child services to the scope list in the policy.

For Service Discovery procedures, see the Service Modeling Best Practices Guide.