Use Discovery Data and Service Maps to Resolve Issues
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Differentiate between affected and impacted CIs when investigating IT service records.
- Describe how the service map visualizes active incidents, problems, and changes to accelerate root cause analysis.
Crisis at the Clinics
Running discovery scans to populate your CMDB is a lot like a successful treasure hunt. Unearthing a chest full of gold is a great accomplishment, but the real reward is actually getting to enjoy it. The same logic applies to your IT data. Gathering the assets is one piece of the puzzle; the true payoff is putting that data to work.
Let’s check back with Orivian Global Holdings one last time. You successfully ran an API-based discovery scan to ingest the cloud infrastructure for the newly acquired healthcare clinics. But suddenly, the IT service desk lights up. Doctors at the clinics cannot access patient records on the web portal. A critical problem is logged, and the clock is ticking.
Dilemma to Dashboard to Diagnosis
If you completed the Incident and Problem Management in Agentforce IT Service badge, you already know how to log, track, and resolve IT disruptions. To bridge that gap and connect the dots between the support tickets and your CMDB infrastructure, an IT fulfiller simply opens an incident, problem, or change request and navigates to the Related tab. Here, they can link the relevant assets from the CMDB using two key lists.
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Affected CIs: The specific assets that are the direct source of the failure (the root cause).
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Impacted CIs: The downstream business services or dependent assets that are negatively affected by the failure (the blast radius).
In our scenario, an Orivian front-line help desk representative logs the doctors' complaints into a new critical incident. During the initial triage, an incident fulfiller or manager investigates the error logs, identifies the newly discovered gateway as the culprit, and manually adds it to the incident's Affected CIs related list.
By formally linking the operational event (the outage) to the infrastructure asset (the gateway), they bridge the gap between the service desk and the infrastructure team. Because of this simple link, you calmly navigate to the CMDB Dashboard and check the Top Incident-Generating Items widget. Almost immediately, it highlights the culprit: a gateway on Azure that is suddenly racking up incidents.
The Power of Context-Aware Service Maps
You click into the gateway's Configuration Item (CI) record and click the Service Map button. Because the automated process jobs already built the relationships in the background, the map dynamically loads. It displays the gateway as the central node, surrounded by all of its connected upstream and downstream cloud resources.
But the map isn’t just a static picture—it is context-aware. You quickly notice a visual alert icon (an orange briefcase with a question mark) next to a virtual gateway. This is management, problem, change and release management in action.
You hover over the alert icon and see an active problem ticket: a faulty security patch was just applied to that specific virtual machine, causing it to reject traffic from the gateway. You instantly found the root cause. You quickly collaborate with the server team to roll back the patch, restoring access for the doctors before it becomes a massive outage.
Dynamic Alert Icons
Our example shows a problem icon 
associated with an asset on the graph. An incident 
or change request 
can also be shown.
Black Diamond Detour: Let AI Help
Now that the crisis is averted, let's pull back the curtain. In our scenario, the IT fulfiller manually dug through error logs to match the doctors' generic complaints to the specific Azure gateway. In a massive enterprise environment, that can be a daunting dilemma.
To solve this, Agentforce IT Service offers a feature called Identify Affected Configuration Items with Einstein.
Instead of manually searching the CMDB, an IT fulfiller simply clicks a button called Find Affected CIs (Einstein) on the incident record.
The feature to find affected CIs relies on deep AI analysis. It requires Data 360 to be configured with active Search Indexes for your IT records before the button appears in your org. See Resources for more information.
Agentforce instantly analyzes the text description of the incident, cross-references it with your discovered assets and historical data, and provides a ranked list of suggested CIs complete with confidence scores (for example, Gateway-Router-NA-01: 95% confidence). The fulfiller just reviews the suggestion and clicks Save!
Wrap Up
Great job! You covered a lot of ground in this badge. You learned how Agentforce IT Service combines a structured configuration management database (CMDB) with an automated discovery engine. By bringing all your IT assets into a single source of truth, you can optimize IT costs, visualize complex dependencies, and resolve critical issues faster than ever before.
Resources