Service Discovery Overview
Service Discovery enables you to configure and run activities to discover your business services and applications. The discovery process starts from a CI that represents the URL of a specified service, and continues only with other CIs that can potentially be related to the service.
The Service Discovery process builds dependency graphs from the consumer-provider components that make-up a service, as follows:
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A business-service CI is connected to the start-point component.
The start-point component is the first CI referred by the URL of the service. This is the URL through which the service is consumed by users or by other business services.
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The start-point component is connected to its neighbor components with consumer-provider relationships.
These neighbor components are the providers that are directly used by the start-point component. In this context, these neighbor components take on a consumer role.
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The start-point’s neighbor components (now taking on consumer roles) are connected via consumer-provider relationships to their own neighbors (their providers).
Discovery recursively connects neighbors to additional neighbors of these neighbors via consumer-provider relationships, until all the components that make up the service are connected.
Often, a component or running software may be both a consumer and a provider.
For more information about consumers and providers, see Providers and Consumers.
Service Scope
You use service-border rules to define when one service ends and another one starts. These rules enable the discovery process to categorize consumer-provider relationships as either internal or external.
- An external consumer-provider relationship connects two components that belong to different business services.
- An internal consumer-provider relationship connects two components that belong to the same business service.
The discovery process can report this category for consumer-provider relationships, since it is populated as the value of an attribute of the consumer-provider relationship.
You can therefore define the service scope to be all the components reachable from the start-point component by a path made only of internal consumer-provider relationships (that is, only consumer-provider relationships labeled as internal).
While discovering a service's components, the discovery process halts when it reaches a new provider that is connected by an external consumer-provider relationship. This means that the discovery process does not discover a provider's neighbors. To enable this functionality, you must define service-border rules before you initiate the discovery process.
However, in many cases, you want to discover the service before defining the service-border-rules. You want to see which components make up the service, and only then define the service-border-rules for these discovered components. To limit the discovery process and prevent it from endlessly discovery neighbors of neighbors, use the Hop Limit setting when you create a Service Discovery activity.