SharePoint 2016 Central Admin - Application Management - Configure Service Application Associations

When you click on the "Configure Service Application Associations" link, you will land on the Service Application Associations page. This page gives SharePoint admin an option to control association of the service application proxy groups to the web application or service application.

Or, if some solutions are deployed to the farm, then you will get something like this.

SharePoint

Configure service application associations page’s direct link: /_admin/ApplicationAssociations.aspx

What is Service Application Proxy?

When a consumer (i.e. Web application, web parts etc.) wants to use any given service application in SharePoint, then they need a link to reach it and that link is called Service Application Proxy or service connection. Without service application proxy, no one can communicate to the service application.

When you create a service application in SharePoint Server 2016, a service application connection is created. A service application connection associates the service application to web applications via membership in a service application connection group (also referred to as application proxy group).

If you create a new service application using the Central Admin, it is automatically added to the default application proxy group. But if you use PowerShell Cmdlets to create a service application, you have to specify the Application Proxy group since it won't add in the default group.

For web applications, you can associate all to the default application proxy group or you can create a custom group for each web app as per your requirement.

You can do multiple things over here.

Change the web application’s Service Group Connection

If you click on the Web Application Name (TeamWeb) under Web Application / Service Application,
You will land on Configure Service Application Associations Page.
To change the association from dropdown, select Custom.
On this page, now you have the option to check the desired Service Applications. And, click OK.
You can see that Mysite web application is still in “Default” proxy group but Team Web Application is in Custom proxy group.

Change the Service Applications for Default Group.

To change the service application's connections in default group, click on the default.
On "Configure Service Application Associations" page, please unselect the Service Applications which you don’t want in the default group ( We uncheck the KFMMS) and click OK.
Now, you will see that KFMMS is not a part of the default Application Proxy Group.

Change the Service Application Group for a Service Applications

In case you want to create a custom group for a service application, please select service applications from View dropdown and click on the desired service application.
On this page, select "custom" from the dropdown.
Select the desired service applications ( KF-UPA) and click OK.
You can see that KF-UPA Service is now part of Custom Application Proxy group.

This concludes the post. In this post, we learned how to change service application connections to a service application connection group in SharePoint Server 2016.

Keep learning and enjoying SharePoint.