Connect Service Instances to Offerings in CSM Full
CSM Full, Configuration Management enabled and relevant CI/Instance permissions; Offering owner/secondary owner or administrator rights to manage its links.
A Service Instance is a concrete deployed realization, such as Employee Portal EU Production. It extends a Configuration Item and shares that CI's identity, so it can participate in technical configuration relationships. It is not a Service, Offering, Catalog Item or Business Application.
Before you start
Confirm CSM Full and Configuration Management activation. Locate trustworthy deployment information and the Offering whose commitment it supports. ITSM Lite can operate on Services and Offerings without these technical records; switching views does not automatically discover Instances or build reliable maps.
Steps
- In Configuration Management, locate the existing Service Instance or create the appropriate CI/Instance subtype where your interface and rights allow.
- Record its deployment identifier, region, mapping method and other supported operational attributes. Associate the Business Application where appropriate.
- Open the relevant Service Offering and its Instances/relationships section.
- Select the existing Instance and deliberately choose Delivers Offering, Supported by Offering or Managed through Offering.
- Save and verify the linked Instance. Inspect the reverse view of Offerings associated with that Instance where available.
- Review relationship activity and validity information where exposed. Avoid duplicate links for the same Offering, Instance and role.
- Separately maintain the CI dependency relationships and explicit impact modes needed for technical reasoning.
- Check the resulting service context in operational workflows without assuming the map proves current health or end-to-end availability.
Expected result
The Offering's commitments connect to the concrete deployment with a declared meaning. An Offering may link to several Instances, and an Instance may participate in several Offerings. Multiple roles are possible for the same pair; an exact Offering/Instance/role duplicate is prevented.
Relationship roles
- DELIVERS_OFFERING: identifies the Instance delivering the Offering.
- SUPPORTED_BY_OFFERING: describes the specified support relationship with that Offering.
- MANAGED_THROUGH_OFFERING: describes a management relationship through that Offering.
Choose the role that reflects the actual arrangement. These are explicit associations, not interchangeable labels or an implicit single-owner rule. They are distinct from technical dependency edges and their impact modes.
Application versus deployment
Employee Portal can be a Business Application managed independently of deployments. Employee Portal EU PROD and Employee Portal TEST are distinct Service Instances and can relate to different Offerings. The application association is optional; similar names do not establish an application or Offering link.
Impact, availability and data quality
An Offering–Instance association provides service context. Impact still depends on actual CI relationships, configured propagation modes and enabled analysis. Relationships do not all carry impact automatically, and a portfolio parent relationship is not a dependency edge.
An availability target is a commitment, not a live measurement. A linked Instance does not establish measured end-to-end availability. Availability calculations rely on supported rules and recorded outage evidence; an Incident alone does not record downtime. Confirm scope and data quality before interpreting an impact or availability result.
Worked example
An Employee Portal Service has Production Support and Development Support Offerings, with Production selected as default. They retain different teams, schedules and priority targets.
In CSM Full, the configuration team links Employee Portal EU PROD to Production Support as DELIVERS_OFFERING, associates its Business Application and models its database/runtime dependencies as CI relationships. A separate TEST Instance supports development context. A Request portal access Catalog Item remains a requestable action referencing the appropriate Service/Offering, not another technical deployment or Offering.
Important behaviour
CSM Full and module activation enable features; they do not guarantee complete or accurate deployment data. Retiring an Instance does not automatically retire its Service or every linked Offering. Maintain links, commitments and technical dependencies deliberately, and verify permissions separately for CI maintenance and Offering-link management.