After you have established the business processes, create a business topology to model them. The Business Impact Manager has special elements to describe business processes, including ServiceOffering, BusinessProcess, ServiceSubscriber, Customer, and others. The Business Impact Manager provides flexibility in classifying elements, but be consistent in your choices.
The names of these business elements or entities must be unique. The Global Manager assigns prefixes to the names of business elements to identify elements, but their display names do not include this prefix. When importing topology, remember to specify these names. When using a custom adapter to import topology, the element names must include the prefix.
The relationship between elements in the business topology is defined as part of an element’s definition. The next step in designing the business topology is to define relationships between business elements and other elements. As you do this, consider the following:
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How do infrastructure and other events affect business elements?
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What are the critical elements upon which the business elements rely?
In the case of an internet service provider (ISP), ServiceOffering represents the connections between a customer and the ISP. ServiceSubscriber represents a customer. You can make other choices. In this example, a ServiceOffering is a specific contract to provide a connection to a ServiceSubscriber. The business topology gets linked to infrastructure elements through more definitions. The critical elements associated with a ServiceOffering are the customer routers. While the ISP edge routers are important, a ServiceOffering does not necessarily have to be associated with a particular router. When events affect customer routers, the ServiceOffering is directly affected. These routers are associated as members of the ServiceOffering.
Note:As the ISP does not manage the customer routers, the ISP has only ICMP access to those routers. The ISP could choose to represent those routers as hosts.
