Planning Service Models › Planning Service Models › Best Practices

Best Practices

As you begin modeling services in CA SOI, consider the following best practices:

• Determine and start with the services that matter the most to your enterprise. The most important services typically contain the most supporting documentation.
• Organize resources into groups and subservices wherever possible to increase the modularity of your service. You can reuse groups and subservices across multiple services. Logical groupings make it easier for you to create a service model whose layout, root cause, and service impact is easy to comprehend.
• Start with bottom-up service models, either imported from domain managers or modeled organically, and move to top-down in a phased approach.
• Take advantage of federated modeling concepts, which let you start with relatively simple service models and still obtain root cause information using the distributed intelligence of integrated products.
• Take advantage of low granularity modeling, so that less detailed models can automatically aggregate alerts from related unmodeled CIs and immediately return results similar to those of more comprehensive models.
• Take advantage of service discovery to automatically add services or create relationships based on criteria that define logical groups of resources and object relationships in your enterprise. Services created by service discovery update dynamically according to changes in your enterprise.
• Gradually move to more comprehensive models as your usage of the product grows.
• Even as your service models become more detailed, keep them as lightweight as possible so that they include only the essential information to support reconciliation, service impact, and root cause.
• As you build the service model, save or validate often, so that potential errors are easier to resolve.