When you create services, you provide a name and description, and then add policies. You can add multiple policy types to a service; for example, you can add a monitoring policy that provides baseline monitoring and an associated report policy that reports on the alerts that are generated by the monitoring policy.
You can also copy a service. Copied services have the same name as the original, with the word -Copy appended.
Best Practices for Creating Services
The easiest way to use services is to add them to a service plan. This way, you are standardizing how the service is used across your sites. For example, you can apply the service plan to a site, if you want to use a site-based delivery model. You could also use a group-based delivery model, in which you apply the service plan to a group.
For more information about service delivery models, see Determining a Service Delivery Model.
Avoid relying on specific inclusions or exclusions as a maintenance strategy.
Although you can force the inclusion and exclusion of specific sites, groups, and devices in a service, relying heavily on this method can result in a complicated setup that is difficult to maintain. As a best practice, you should rely on:
- Your policies to determine the type of devices to which the service applies, as policies include automatic inclusion rules to determine how the services are applied.
- Service plans to determine to which sites or groups the service are applied.
Relying on policies and service plans to determine how services are applied lets you update your service offerings centrally, by either updating the automatic inclusion rules in the policies or by applying or removing the entire service plan as needed.
Ensure that you add Report policies to the same service as their associated policies.
For example, if you are providing Avast Antivirus to a customer, and by extension you are offering the Avast Antivirus Summary report, you should create a service that includes both the AV policy and the Report policy with the Avast Antivirus Summary report. Do not put these policies in separate services, as you could end up with an empty Avast Antivirus Summary report if you remove the service with the AV policy but you do not remove the service with the Report policy.