Affected services vs. Components on Customer portal

[Patrick Haley]

Our customers currently use Components, but we’re updating the request forms and starting to use JSM and Ops Genie. Should our customers be selecting Affected services, or Components?

[Mikael Sandberg · Accepted solution]

As @Jack Brickey mentioned, this is up to you and your team. The affected services is linked to Services, which allows you to set dependencies to other Services and also add incident responders (linked to Opsgenie), Change approvers (allows you to add them as approvers if there is a change request affecting the service), and link it to another project and repository for change management. And since Services are now integrated into Insight you could add more attributes to a service and do more automations around it. You can find more information about this integration here, How services work with Insight in Jira Service Management 

[Patrick Haley]

Thanks. We've always used Components for tracking apps, but for me it's all about the big picture when it comes to Services and what the new features entail. I think you've convinced me to go the Services route and adopt a different purpose for Components.

[John Mustac]

The issue you will have with this is that customers cannot see the Affected Services field in the portal request type, whereas they can see the components field. 

I agree that there is huge value in moving to the use of Services but you will need a different approach if you want customers to choose a Service. One solution would be to use Components (replicating the Service list) and use automation to set the Affected Service. The downside is having to manually manage the Component list. 

[John Mustac]

and probably the better path is to use the insight object field which can be shown on the portal and scope it to show only 'enterprise applications' (for example) so it all becomes dynamic and no need to use manual lists.

[Joshua Elcik]

Yeah until customer portal users can see services without having to spend money on a license then I think the entire functionality of Services is broken. I want my customer to pick the affected service so that all of that cool automation on the backend an actually work. 

[Jack Brickey]

I’m on unfamiliar with affected services. However I suspect that it really is subjective which ever works for you and your team.