Where is the documentation of the JSM "Service type" attribute?
Asked by Rick Westbrock:

While editing a JSM service today I noticed that there is a new attribute named "Service type" which has four options in the drop-down menu:

* Applications
* Business services
* Capabilities
* Software services

I searched for documentation about this attribute but couldn't seem to find any. This is definitely a new attribute in the past three months or so (I rarely look at the Services list so I can't get more specific than that) and the [Create a service](https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/create-a-service/) documentation page doesn't mention it at all. There is no helper text in the dialog box either (like other attributes have):

![JSM-service-type.png](/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/298365iC7FE8F0BB43DF3C9/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "JSM-service-type.png"):

I want to understand the intent of this attribute, how Applications and Software services differ from each other and what Capabilities is supposed to indicate (as that one is seems arcane to me).


Answers:
author: Caroline Bartle
body: Hi [@Rick Westbrock](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/604528) - we've rolled out service types to Services in Jira Service Management as the first step towards supporting a sync with [Compass](https://www.atlassian.com/software/compass).

Compass supports a number of components, a subset of which we know are critical for customers using Jira Service Management for IT Operations (in particular, for incident and change management). So eventually software services, applications and capabilities will be synced across the two catalogs, allowing for easy usage of both JSM and Compass features.

comments: author: Caroline Bartle
body: I forgot to add - we'll be updating our documentation to reflect this new addition. Apologies for the delay on this.


author: Rick Westbrock
body: Thank you for the details, I will admit it is disappointing that the documentation was not ready to publish when the feature was rolled out but hopefully it will be published soon.


author: David Lowney
body: "Service Type" also isn't currently part of the data when selecting Export objects.


author: Ole Treptow
body: any updates yet? would be really helpful since we are starting the concept for customer facing services integrated in our it-service catalogue enabling it-operations incident management triggered by customer service management.

[@Rick Westbrock](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/604528) we used C4-documentation in order to grasp our it-complexity on a comprehensive level. on the context flight level we use applications and the elements of a container are most of the time services but we use different objects (applications, cloud resources) as well. hope this helps.

You'll find the documentation for C4 here: [The C4 model for visualising software architecture](https://c4model.com/#SystemContextDiagram)


author: Gary Pullis
body: Per: <https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/what-is-services/> that
> A **type** , which is used as a label to help categorise the nature of the service and has no technical impact on the service.

That's great that we can decide for ourselves what those labels mean, but it seems clear that someone at Atlassian had, at some point, come up with a "default" or "best practice" definition for these labels. It would be awful nice to let us customers in on this. Even if we decide to use them differently in the end, it would be nice to know what y'all were thinking.


author: Jack Brickey
body: Maybe this will help? [manage-your-services](https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/manage-your-services/)

comments: author: Paul MacLeod
body: Thanks Jack, but like Rick, I've been through those pages multiple times, searched with lots of different terms to see if I can find what we need, but nothing. The section that talks about creating a service makes no reference to this drop down, so it would be great to understand its purpose, and what (if any) difference it makes to a service defined as a "Business Services" type or "Software services" type.

Any other suggestions? Does anyone use these fields and know what they do/are intended for?


author: Jack Brickey
body: I have flagged the post to see if someone can point us to specific documentation should it exist. While I see Service type in the Create Service screen on one of my test instances I do not on another so likely a new introduction as there is a big push on ITSM of late.


author: Carey Fruitman
body: I found this in JSM Support: [What are services? \| Jira Service Management Cloud \| Atlassian Support](https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/what-is-services/). In this document it describes the service attributes, among them

"A **type** , which is used as a label to help categorise the nature of the service and has no technical impact on the service."

In the following sentence they say, "How services work for you depends on how you want to use them -- they're designed to be customized to your needs."

So basically, it seems we can use those service types however we want, or not. They are only labels. Now the question is, can we define additional service types to be used in that dropdown?


author: Stephan Hannach
body: There is now a link for a documentation, which leads to nowhere. :(

![Screenshot 2024-05-28 at 19.25.41.png](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/326407iC0BE23DB3E9638A1/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Screenshot 2024-05-28 at 19.25.41.png")


author: Matthiew Marks
body: I'm starting to think this has been abandoned.

It's been months and the promised documentation is still missing.

<https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Service-Management/Re-Re-Where-is-the-documentation-of-the-JSM-quot-Service-ty/qaq-p/2570322/comment-id/156774#M156774>

comments: author: Jens Wachtel
body: Yes, I'd like to know the differences between those types as well...


author: Linda Buchanan
body: Any update on this  

I am interested in the Atlassian definitions of the service types as this will make a real difference in how we configure ..   

Wondering about 'technical' services as this is typical in ITSM Solutions  

The doco on services is very light, and it's hard to know how detailed to go at the Serivices level vs. individual CIs (assets) that make up those services i.e. if this host or application is down, the payroll service is impacted...  

Also having everything under 'Assets' is very confusing for people i.e. it's a Mix of Services and a CMDB/CI (where yes some/many of those are 'Assets" in terms of the true defn of assets e.g financial)  

comments: author: Carey Fruitman
body: I'm also dealing with those same issues (mapping CIs to services).


author: Gary Pullis
body: Based on my limited research, it seems that these Type labels were added for the benefit of people familiar with ServiceNow's Common Service Data Model (CSDM) and / or the ITIL Service based framework (or the TOGAF Capability based framework).

The general topic appears to be Enterprise Architecture (EA). It's complex enough that ServiceNow has a whole on-demand training course on it.

Based on what I've dipped by toes into, I think Atlassian is doing us a favor by saying, "they're just labels, do what you want with them". :-/


Tags: atl-rvw

cloud

jira-service-management

jira-service-management-cloud