View the change history of application services in classic Service Mapping

You can view the changes made to an application service as a whole and to the individual configuration items (CIs) comprising the service. Change history is useful for maintenance, planning, or troubleshooting procedures.

Before you begin

Role required: sn_cmdb_admin, admin, service_mapping_admin, service_mapping_user, app_service_admin, or app_service_user

About this task

Details about changes to a service instance and to its CIs are stored in the CMDB. Typically, these changes reflect adding or removing CIs from a service instance, upgrading or updating CIs, or modifying CI configuration files. The system gathers this data by querying CMDB tables and then creating the change history view. In deployments where Service Mapping is activated, the type of change information Service Mapping queries depends on discovery patterns that Service Mapping uses to discover CIs.

Changes to configuration files are associated with CIs to which these files belong. Maps show configuration file changes as changes to related CIs.

While you can see change records for a specific CI in the context of application services, you can also see detailed history of a specific CI separate from its service instance as described in History Timeline.

If the ServiceNow AI Platform is configured to validate changes, all changes are evaluated and rendered as valid or not. If a change is valid, its change record on the service instance map is marked as approved. For more information about configuring the platform for change validation, see Managing proposed changes.

Changes to the service instance appear on the history timeline.

The type of change mark depends on the nature of changes that it represents:

• **Light gray balloon (

Unapproved change that does not influence the service instance behavior. For example, a change in a network path or adding a node to a cluster.

• **Dark gray balloon (

Unapproved change that changes the service instance behavior.

• **Green balloon (

An approved change in deployments where the ServiceNow AI Platform is configured to validate changes.

• **Double balloon (

Multiple separate changes that happened a short time from each other.

You can mark times on the history scale by creating baselines to quickly return to the marked view.

Procedure

1. Open the service instance map.

   1. Navigate to All > CSDM > Manage Technology Management Services > Service Instance.

   2. Select the needed service instance.

   3. On the service instance page, select View Map.

2. Review change records created for this service instance on the Changes tab at the bottom of the page.

   If Service Mapping is deployed, then in Edit mode, the Discovery Messages section appears below the map.

3. On the history timeline, set the time range of changes that you want to view.

The map shows the history view of the service instance for the time you selected.

**Note:** The **Change** tab shows all change records, even the ones which are filtered out of the history view.

2.  Navigate to the time you want to mark as a baseline on the history scale.

3.  Click **Set baseline**.

4.  Enter the name of the baseline and click **OK**.

    The new baseline appears as a button above the history scale and as a blue flag on the history scale.