Relationships

ICIM-defined relationships enable Business Impact Manager to associate business elements with each other, and with underlying infrastructure, application, or hierarchical group elements. The relationships also identify the dependencies of elements on other elements, and identify groupings.

In most cases, a relationship has an inverse relationship. For example, the relationship PartOf is the inverse relationship of ComposedOf. A relationship pair, such as ComposedOf/PartOf, is referred to as a relationship set.

You use the Topology Builder to create the following relationships between elements (nodes) in Business Services map displays:

• Subscriptions/Subscribers relationship set

• (corresponds to subscriptions/subscribers relationship keywords in import datafiles):

  The Subscriptions relationship associates a ServiceSubscriber or ServiceSubscriber subclass to one or more ServiceOfferings or BusinessProcesses that are being provided to the ServiceSubscriber or ServiceSubscriber subclass.

  The Subscribers relationship associates a ServiceOffering or BusinessProcess to one or more ServiceSubscribers or ServiceSubscriber subclasses who subscribe to the ServiceOffering or BusinessProcess.

• ConsistsOf/MemberOf relationship set

• (corresponds to members relationship keyword in import datafiles):

  The ConsistsOf relationship associates a ServiceOffering or BusinessProcess to one or more underlying infrastructure, application, or hierarchical group elements that are directly relied upon by the ServiceOffering or BusinessProcess. The list of underlying elements might be a list of network elements (hosts, routers, and so on), a list of applications, or a HierarchicalGroup.

  The MemberOf relationship associates an underlying infrastructure, application, or hierarchical group element to one or more ServiceOfferings or BusinessProcesses that directly rely upon the infrastructure, application, or hierarchical group element.

  The ConsistsOf/MemberOf relationship set can also associate a ServiceOffering to another ServiceOffering, or to a BusinessProcess, and can associate a BusinessProcess to another BusinessProcess, or to a ServiceOffering.

• ServedBy/Serves relationship set

• (corresponds to servedby/serves relationship keywords in import datafiles):

  The ServedBy relationship set associates a BusinessProcess to one or more other BusinessProcesses that serve the BusinessProcess.

  The Serves relationship associates a BusinessProcess to one or more other BusinessProcesses that are served by the BusinessProcess.

• ComposedOf/PartOf relationship set

• (corresponds to composedof/partof relationship keywords in import datafiles):

  The ComposedOf relationship associates a ServiceSubscriber or ServiceSubscriber subclass to one or more other ServiceSubscribers or ServiceSubscriber subclasses that it contains.

  The PartOf relationship associates a ServiceSubscriber or ServiceSubscriber subclass to one or more other ServiceSubscribers or ServiceSubscriber subclasses in which it is contained.

  Because the arrowed lines in a Business Services map point from a business element to the element that it depends on, only the Subscriptions, ConsistsOf, ServedBy, and ComposedOf relationships appear in a Business Services map. Their inverse relationships are implied but not shown.