4.0 was just released. All business-service related functionality was added to the "old" nxmc.
Some brief explanation of new business services is in this text:
Business services that were present earlier were totally rewritten with tons of new functionality.
In a nutshell, Business Services is a tool for availability monitoring of logical services. Company email, web site, server farm, call center - all are examples of logical services. Or, these could be services your company is providing to others, e.g. if you are an ISP or MSP.
Moreover, the services can be combined together to define a “broader” logical service. For example, company DNS, web site and firewall all can be referred to as “Company Internet Services” and monitored for availability as a whole. So if the name server goes down then the “Company Internet Services” do not function properly as a whole. This feature can be used both for internal QA and external Service Level Agreement (SLA) monitoring.
Status of a business service depends on status of objects, DCI thresholds or script execution results. These things are called checks. Each business service can have multiple checks. Checks can be created manually or automatically with the help of auto bind scripts.
It’s also possible to populate business services automatically – they are created on the basis of Business Service Prototype objects using instance discovery mechanism (similar to DCI instance discovery methods). Prototypes can have a number of predefined checks or scripts for automatic creation of checks.
Availability charts also got more flexibility. Now it's possible to get pie chart and detailed information about problems occurred for a business service, start time, end time and reason. Availability has some predefined time ranges or date selector for arbitrary date range.
New functionality provides more manager or business level information about your environment health and SLA compliance. Extensive scripting and discovery allows to automate creation and operation of business services. As the result, business services can give vital measurable information about your infrastructure work.
