Service Border Rule

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.