When you create a new category it is automatically added to the “Consumer Service Catalog” root category.

Note	Ensure that you remove the category from the root category for the catalog if needed, and associate it with appropriate categories and subcategories for your catalog.

You can delete a category if you no longer need it by choosing the category and clicking Delete.

Site administrators can use the Organization Designer module to grant user access to Service Item Manager and the Administration module to configure how end users can access service items in My Services.

To define a service item, you must have Service Lifecycle Management roles assigned using Organization Designer.

Roles and capabilities, managed with the Organization Designer module, allow site administrators to control access to functionality provided by the Service Item Manager module. The Service Item Manager role will allow administrators to view the service items assigned to all Service Catalog users.

The Service Item Manager roles should be assigned sparingly. Granting a user the capability to manage standards data or define standards means that user can edit all standards definitions and all standards data. A similar caveat applies to the capabilities controlling service item definitions and data.

For more information, see Capabilities for Service Item Manager section in Cisco Prime Service Catalog Administration and Operations Guide

After you create a service item, you should configure the service item such that the workflow of the service item is managed automatically.

• Define the service items that can be displayed on the Service Catalog page, or create a separate web page to display list of service items on the Service Catalog homepage. See Configuring Service Item Definition.
• Associate multiple services to a service item for displaying associated services when a service item is chosen for ordering. See Associating Services for a Service Item.
• Define the actions to be executed against a service item instance when certain conditions are met. See Understanding Service Items Policies.
• Create custom-defined statuses for the service item. See Configuring Custom-Defined Status For a Service Item.
• Ensure only a certain state transitions occur by defining finite state transition for a service item. See Defining a Finite State Transition for a Service Item.
• Define permissions on which service item types and instances the user can access and which actions (create/update/delete/view) are allowed. See Defining Permissions to Perform Operations for Service Item Types .
• Displaying Out-of-Box service item attributes on My Stuff page in the Service Catalog. See Customizing My Stuff Page.

To delete an associated service:

To delete an associated service for a service item, choose the associated service by clicking on it (use Ctl+Click or Shift+Click to choose multiple services), and click Delete.

To control the related services that can be ordered based on status definition:

Choose the associated service and select status definitions check box as required to modify the display of the related services for a service item depending on the status of the service item. For example, if the service item is a virtual machine and the related services are Start VM and Stop VM. The states defined are online and offline. You can Start VM only when the status of the VM is offline.

Note	If you have created a status definition for the service item as defined in Managing Status Definition, the status definition check box appears in Associated Service Window.

Policies are used to define the actions to be executed against a service item instance when certain conditions are met. A typical example is that when a virtual machine is approaching its expiration date, an automatic notification is sent to its owner as a reminder. Other policy actions may include triggering a service request to process the service item, or logging an alert for administrators, or preventing a new service request from being submitted. Policies may be defined to be specific to an account or generic to all accounts.

The policies are categorized into four types, namely: Capacity, Quota, Timebound, and Event-based policies.

Capacity- When you define a capacity policy, you enforce a limit for the usage of an attribute. An action is performed when the usage exceeds the defined limit. Before you define a capacity policy, you must define the service item attribute that has to be managed by the capacity policy. See Managing Service Item Attributes.

When you configure a service item attribute as a capacity attribute, the following attributes are generated to be used for capacity management:

• • Used{AttributeName}, for example, "UsedVCPU" - Used by the application to track how much of the capacity is used. This value is not user-modifiable.
  • Req{AttributeName}, for example, "ReqVCPU" - Used by service designer to pass the capacity change required in service requests or update operations in service item APIs.

You can use capacity policy to track your own resource consumption such as type of storage network, usage of each of the elements in the network, and take necessary actions accordingly if you are a service provider.

Examples of Capacity policy:

• • You may define a policy that sends an email when the capacity of the storage area network reaches 80% of the capacity.
• Quota - The quota policy is executed when an Item Attribute reaches the threshold% of maximum value. Each quota policy is specific to an account and cannot be applied to multiple accounts. Before you define a quota policy you must:
  • Define the service item attribute that has to be managed by the quota policy. See Managing Service Item Attributes.
  • Ensure a quota is already defined in an agreement that corresponds to the account being referenced in the quota policy. This is maintained under Demand Management > Agreement. The service item that is subject to quota management should already be included in the agreement quota with an appropriate aggregate method (see Configuring Billing Rates Based on Usage for more information).
  • When specifying a quota policy, select the appropriate aggregate method that tracks the quota consumption. The “Sum” aggregate method manages the quota based on the sum of a specific attribute consumed by all service item instances (for example, sum of disk size for all datastores owned by the account). The “Count” aggregate method manages the quota simply based on the service item count (for example, total number of virtual machines owned by the account).

Examples of Quota Policy:

• • A policy that sends an email when the count of the virtual machine for an account reaches 70% of the quota.
  • A policy that orders a service when the storage of the virtual disk for an account reaches 75% of the quota.
• Timebound - This policy is executed when the date attributes of the service item reaches or exceeds the defined value. A poller evaluates the time bound policies at a time interval of every 30 minutes by default and performs actions as necessary. You can enable/disable the poller in the support.properties file. For more information about configuration files, see Cisco Prime Service Catalog Administration and Operations Guide.

Examples of Timebound Policy:

• A policy that sends an email to the owner of a software subscription one month before the subscription expiration to remind the person to renew the subscription.
• A policy that revokes the subscription to a software on the lease expiration date.

To see the example of how you can terminate a lease using this policy, see Configuring Time-Bound Policies.

To define this policy on a service item, there must be at least one service item attribute of attribute type “DateTime”.

• Event based - Event based policies support three conditions:
  • An action is triggered when a service item attribute reaches a particular value.
  • An action is triggered when a service item attribute reaches a particular value, or when the attribute value has been modified.
  • An action is triggered when the service item attribute satisfies certain conditions. You can define a condition for a service item attribute, to determine if the particular value 'is equal to', 'is not equal to', 'contains' or 'does not contain' based on the options you can select from the logical operator drop-down list to trigger an event. You can either enter the value for the service item attribute or select from the namespace icon. You can add multiple conditions and more than one service item attribute for a particular value.

Examples of Event-based Policy:

• • Perform action when attribute is updated - Create a policy that records a policy alert when the status of the virtual machine becomes offline.
  • Perform action when conditions are met - Create a policy with conditions that record a policy alert when the RAM value has reached its maximum limit and sends an email when the status of production HANA database goes offline and the backup server is active.

Policy Actions

One or more actions may be performed when the policy condition is satisfied. The predefined actions are:

• Stop submission- Prohibit the requester from making another request to consume the service item. This action is not applicable to the time bound policy type.
• Order Service- Spawn a request for a service within the catalog to allow a supporting operation to take place. If you choose to order a service when a condition is satisfied, then you must also:
  • Select a service from a list of existing service definitions
  • Specify the values to be passed to the service form. Any namespaces referenced will be resolved to the actual values based on the context when the service is ordered. For more information, see Namespace Usage.
• Send email- If you choose to send an email when the policy condition is satisfied you must also select an email template from the email template drop-down list. You can define email templates in Administration > Notifications, just like any other email templates used for service delivery.
• Policy alert- Log the policy trigger occurrence that serves as an audit trail for administrators to review. If you send a policy alert to the application you must also provide a descriptive message for the alert. You can also use namespaces to specify the service item attribute that will be resolved when the message is displayed.

To view the list of policy alerts when the condition is satisfied, add the Policy Alert portlet to any existing portal pages in Service Portal module. Choose Service Portal> Edit Page > Add Content > Reserved portlets. Click Policy alerts check box. Policy alerts are logged for Policy alert and Order Service actions.

To view the list of policies defined already for a service item, click on a service item from the Service Items list panel and select the Policy tab. You can choose to see all the policies for an account using the Filter by account field.

To delete an operation, select an operation from the Operation Summary table and click Remove Selected.

To delete permissions select a role from the Permission Summary table and click Delete.

This section describes procedures to customize My Products & Services page of Service Catalog module.

You can import Service item from an automated or semiautomated system external to Service Catalog. Service Catalog can then track service item provisioning and other updates. Service item data can be imported at any time, to synchronize Service Catalog data with other records that may have been maintained externally. In addition to importing service item data, the service item definition itself can be imported, either with or without corresponding data. This automates the definition of the service item, so that it does not have to be done manually.

You can import service items and standards using one of the following methods:

• The Import Data option in Service Item Manager allowing administrators to import service items on demand from file. See Importing Service Item from File.
• A request can include a Service Link task to import service items or standards. See Importing Service Items and Standards using Service Link.

If you are using the Service Catalog module navigate to Service catalog> Manage My Stuff > My Stuff to access and order services associated with service items.

Viewing Service Items in the Old My Services Option

My Services offers a Service Items tab and My Items portlet that allow users to access and order services associated with service items. Service items are assigned to a person when they are provisioned via service requests, or when the items are assigned directly to the person using the Service Item Manager module.

The My Items portlet displays the five service items most recently provisioned to the user. Click on the More link in the My Items portlet or the Service Items tab to see a complete list of service items. In addition, the service items that each user can access depend on the read/write permissions he has been granted. Users are always given read/write access to service items that they own.