CA Service Catalog - max amount of Business Units

[Jakub Kolacny]

Dear friends

We have a customer who supports more than 11000 organizations. The need is to set up SC security in a way that every user is able to access any request from his/her organization. This means that every organization should represent a BU.

 

Are there any performance issues for such a large number of business units?

Is there another way how to meet customer needs? Some form level checks?

 

Thank you,

Jakub

[Iain Lambert]

Hi Jakub.

 

There's no hardcoded limit, and I've seen a few sites running with thousands of defined units, yes. But more than the performance hit I'd be concerned about how you set these units up to be manageable going forward - is this to be a very flat structure with only a few providers, or are units several layers deep?

 

thanks

Iain

[Louis van Amelsfort]

Hi Jakub.

Some 'things' to consider:
- Wow, that's a lot of business units. I've seen thousands from a few sites, but it is indeed a performance hit.
- And a **** of a job to maintain so many BUs holding so many offerings probably/accordingly and so many users then too(even more users I guess).

 

Also to be considered:

- How can this amount be handled through teh Catalog UI? Or even (in bulk) with SOAP webservices programs?
- How do you keep an overview of BU>SUB-BU-Catalog content (allowed for each BU)
- How do you keep an overview of BU>SUB-BU-User (allowed for each BU)
- Physically, there is no limit, but for your organization.......

Thanks and kind regards, Louis.

[Louis van Amelsfort]

Hi Jakub.

 

Also see: 

https://comm.support.ca.com/kb/how-to-buildsetup-a-ca-service-catalog-businesss-unit-structure/kb000010846

 

Kind regards, Louis.

[Louis van Amelsfort]

Hi Jakub.

 

And I then also found this one:

https://docops.ca.com/ca-service-management/14-1/en/administering/configuring-ca-service-catalog/manage-business-units-and-tenant-administration

 

Kind regards, Louis.

[Jakub Kolacny]

Louis_van_Amelsfort, IainLambert, 

thank you for your suggestions!

 

All users and organizations are maintained in a separate system which updates users and organization in CA SDM. All users are then imported/updated in the AD LDS for authentication and authorization purposes. Users have the same set of services (only about 7 services at all) so the original idea was to have only one BU for all the users, but there is this need that every user should access all tickets from his organization...

 

So I guess the correct setup is to have a completely flat structure managed by an external script (web services). Is this a correct thought? I'm an SDM guy and don't have many experiences in CA Catalog... 

 

At first glance at CA SC web services, I don't see anything regarding business units management. Is there a possibility to maintain BU and SC users via WS? Or some bulk uploads/updates?

 

Maybe this can be solved on the form level - considering there are only 7 services I can manage some test during form onLoad - something like:

• run a query for the current user to get his organization
• compare the organization with the end user organization
• if the organization is different stop loading the form

This is not a very nice solution but should be easy to develop and maintain

 

Thank you for your time,

Jakub

[Iain Lambert]

Hi,

 

if you're creating all these tenants for SDM anyway, then look at Common Tenant Administration - https://docops.ca.com/ca-service-management/17-2/en/administering/configuring-ca-service-catalog/manage-business-units-and-tenant-administration/configure-common-tenant-administration

[Jakub Kolacny]

Hi IainLambert,

We don't (and can't) use multitenancy for this implementation - we implement catalog widgets as a front-end for already existing SDM implementation which has many integrations so multitenancy is not an option for us.

 

Thank you,

Jakub

[Louis van Amelsfort]

Hi Jakub.

In the above example, running the SOAPUI utility, the "http://HOST:PORT/usm/services/BusinessUnitService?wsdl"

can be used to manipulate BUs in bulk/batch.

 

Kind regards, Louis.

 

Still I would like to advise that managing 10.000 BUs is almost impossible to do.

Technically, probably. Human-wise, not to do. :-)

[Jakub Kolacny]

Great, thanks for the WS example!  I'll give it a try...

 

I completely agree that managing such a huge number of business units is not very comfortable, but I have to deal with the business requirement which is clear and (in this case) also reasonable... And I don't see other options

 

Thank you again,

Jakub

[Jakub Kolacny]

Team,
just some after project notes :)

First, we tried to set up 11000 BU's - it worked, it was maintained using WS API, but we had problems with the catalog performance. 

After this, we finally found a compromise between business needs and system capabilities and now we have around 3000 BU's which doesn't have any significant impact on the performance. Everything is maintained by PAM processes and Catalog WS API.

Jakub