Service Navigator Shows Outages

The Service Navigator, located in the Analytics console, provides an interactive graphical presentation of the dependencies between services and their constituents. By showing whether any of the service categories, services, service instances, or configuration items are down, it has at once become much more powerful.

Imagine that one of an organization’s servers has crashed, resulting in the creation of an incident with impact ‘Top’ (service down for several users). From the Service Navigator, this is now immediately clear. Any affected service categories and services are now displayed with a thicker red line, in this case ‘Enterprise Applications’.

After clicking on ‘Enterprise Applications’ it becomes clear which of the services of that category are affected. After selecting a service from that list, in this case ‘Expense Reporting’, details of the affected service instances are shown.

Following the line of affected service instances, in this case all the way to ‘Virtualization Platform B’, it becomes clear that the issue is with one of the server blades.

From here, it is immediately clear which services are impacted by the broken down configuration item. This is also the visualization that one gets when selecting ‘Service Navigator’ directly from Actions menu within the request. This enhancement was imagined and developed during the Xurrent Imagineering Days.