Service Instance

A service instance is an environment that makes the functionality of a service available. Several of such environments may exist that deliver essentially the same functionality, but for different purposes and/or to different users.

Two service instances may, for example, have been set up for the Email service. One of these instances may be used by the organisation’s employees in North America; the other may be used by its employees in Europe.

By linking a service instance, rather than a service, to an incident, Xurrent is able to accurately calculate the actual level of service that was provided to each customer. For example, when an incident affects the Email service instance in Europe, it is important that this incident is not included in the service level management reports for the North American customers of the Email service.

Service instances are also used to differentiate between the production environment of a service and its development and test environments. This allows incidents affecting the development and test environments to be excluded from the service level management reports that are prepared for customers that only use the production environment.

A service instance can be made up of several configuration items (e.g. an application and web server software), and several child service instances (e.g. a Unix service instance and a database service instance). In turn, a child service instance can also consist of several configuration items (e.g. a Unix server and a Unix operating system), and several child service instances (e.g. a storage service instance and a rack space service instance).

Only a person who has the Service Level Manager role of an account can maintain the service instances of that account.

The Service Instance Fields page provides field utilization guidelines for each field of the Service Instance form.