I have a need to create CIs that cannot be automatically discovered, such as Business Processes and Organizational Heirarchies. Is there a way to define custom CIs and link these custom CIs to other CIs?

For Organizational Hierarchies we already have the OrganisationalUnit node, and these can be nested to arbitrary depth if needed via the Hierarchy relationship. They can can then be linked to Host nodes via the Ownership relationship.

As these are supported and expected parts of the foundation model the UI will then display these links and you can use them in some of the built in reports.

Relating those nodes together would be done by a pattern that contained the business knowledge. Creating the OrganisationalUnit nodes can either be done “on the fly” in this pattern or via the UI (Administration -> Organisational Units)

I recommend you have a look at the taxonomy too (Administration -> Taxonomy) and look up the OrganisationalUnit node and it’s relationships.

For modelling Business Processes you really have 2 options.

The first would be to extend the Taxonomy to include a new BusinessProcess node and associated relationships. I would recommend that route currently only if you had formal support from Tideway. In the 7.2 release we have extended the model slightly to include some generic nodes and relationships to make this easier.

The second and easier option for a Business Process would be to model it as a BusinessApplicationInstance node. The standard Foundation model already is designed to cope with multiple tiers of BAI nodes mode from SoftwareInstances, and modelling an end to end business process as a Foundation BAI is a perfectly valid approach.

I’d recommend having a look at the Application Modelling guide.

Thanks for the info. I’m reading through the Taxonomy now.