Discovery Welcome Guide

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Welcome to ServiceNow® Discovery Are you ready to start your ServiceNow Discovery implementation journey? This guide gives you valuable information you can share with your team, including proven guidance and links to key resources—all designed to set you on the path to success. While this guide is primarily designed for ServiceNow platform owners, it also contains useful information if you have a different role in your organization. Let’s get started!
Guide Overview Here’s an overview of the topics we will cover in the guide: Familiarize yourself with Discovery Decide on business outcomes Chart your implementation path Work with ServiceNow Experts Choose self-implementation Prepare for organizational change Bookmark resources
Start by familiarizing yourself with Discovery Discovery helps you get visibility across your on-premises, cloud, and serverless infrastructure. It comes with many features that provide detailed views across your entire IT estate and also allows you to manage TLS certificates and firewall policies in a single system. You can get a high-level overview of these features in the Discovery datasheet and product documentation. Here are some key features to keep in mind: Automated discovery: Get single-platform visibility into IaaS, PaaS, and FaaS with agent, agentless, and cloud-native discovery. Certificate management: Compile an up-to-date inventory and receive alerts when TLS certificates are about to expire. Firewall audits and reporting: Manage firewall policies on one system to gain visibility, de-risk change, and simplify auditing. Service Graph Connectors: Load third-party data into the CMDB easily while maintaining quality, timeliness, and consistency. The box on the right will also tell you how you can benefit from using Discovery in your organization. This Discovery Fundamentals On Demand course lays the groundwork for mature infrastructure operations management and will also help you learn the basics of Discovery. If you are new to ServiceNow, we also recommend that you take this very short Get Started with the Now Platform course to learn the platform basics. If you want a deeper dive into the Now Platform, a longer ServiceNow Fundamentals course is also available.	Benefits of Discovery: Realize fast time-to-value: Simplify discovery of hardware, virtual and cloud resources, and serverless clusters for the CMDB. Increase service availability: Minimize the danger of service degradation or outage with better certificate and firewall management. Power digital transformation: Understand traditional deployments and manage new cloud and container environments on one system. Make the most of your investments: Integrate discovery data with connectors to build an up-to-date CMDB with automated workflows.
Identify your desired business outcomes Before you start to implement Discovery, it's critical to have a clear vision of what you want to accomplish. Discovery allows you to deliver many positive business outcomes, and you can achieve all of this over time. However, by deciding which outcomes are most important for your organization and agreeing on them with your stakeholders, you can set clear expectations and tailor your initial implementation to realize these goals. Understand your infrastructure and decide what components you want to discover. See how Booking.com uses ServiceNow for cloud discovery and help meeting SOX and PCI compliance requirements. Focus on business goals such as what you want to automate and streamline. Read how De Volksbank streamlined IT with a single universe of truth powered by a complete CMDB. Maintain consistency with organic growth or when acquisitions occur. Learn how Finance of America used ServiceNow to simplify onboarding and on-going management following 15 acquisitions. Reduce time for internal and external audits. See how Finastra saves $350K annually with automated discovery.	Pro Tip: As you plan your initial implementation, it's important to decide what goals and objectives you want to meet first while keeping future requirements in mind. Projects typically struggle when: 1. No initial goals are defined prior 2. There are too many goals for the initial deployment as project scope grows quickly.
Chart a path to implementation Work with ServiceNow experts If you have chosen to work with a ServiceNow partner or ServiceNow Expert Services for your implementation, it's important to clearly communicate the business outcomes you want to achieve and agree on a well-structured roadmap to attain these goals. If you need guidance on successfully engaging with an implementation partner, this workbook is an excellent starting point. To accelerate time to value and reduce risk, make sure that your partner uses Now Create, ServiceNow's library of more than 700 leading implementation practices. We also recommend you use Now Create if you are self-implementing, as it provides a wealth of assets designed to guide you to success. If you want to work with a partner but haven't selected one yet, check out our Partner Finder or talk to your ServiceNow account representative about ServiceNow Expert Services. We can also work with your chosen partner to infuse our expertise into your implementation through our ServiceNow Co-Delivery service offering. For those of you who have purchased ServiceNow Impact services, you will have ServiceNow experts and resources at your fingertips to help you through your implementation of Discovery and achieving your goals. If you do not have a ServiceNow Impact package, consider how having dedicated resources, discounted training, and jumpstart services can help you get the most out of your ServiceNow investment. Read more here.
Choose Self-implementation Build your team’s skills If you are planning to self-implement, you need to give your platform team the skills they need to succeed. The best way of doing this is to become a certified ServiceNow professional. We offer several certification paths for different roles on your team. Check out the links below: IT Operations Management (ITOM) Discovery Implementer Additional Recommended Courses for Discovery Implementers ServiceNow Certified System Administrator Make your implementation smooth and easy For a comprehensive implementation process framework that is proven to scale to the largest, most complex global deployments, check out our Success Packs on Now Create. Success Packs tailor our core Now Create methodology consisting of more than 700 leading practices to deliver business outcomes aligned with specific product sets. Here's the Success Pack related to Discovery: IT Operations Management Visibility: supports customers that are looking to create a unified, connected view of their entire IT landscape and the services it supports.   Join the IT Operations community Visit the IT Operations Management community page. You'll find best practices and other useful resources for Discovery implementation, and it's also the forum to talk to ServiceNow experts, get your questions answered, and connect with other community members.
Prepare for organizational change To successfully deploy Discovery, you need your business to understand and use Discovery and recognize its benefits. To do this, you need to communicate what's changing and why to both your end users and service desk agents. You also need to ensure that your agents are trained on ServiceNow Discovery. Next, tell them why the change is important and what it will give them (how it will make their lives easier and give them better reporting). This webpage provides detailed guidance on how to plan for organizational change. If you need help creating a winning communications plan, this communications plan template also provides useful advice. The following courses are a great starting point for training your agents and other Discovery process users: Discovery Fundamentals Get Started with Now Create Discovery Basics for Software Asset Management Discovery Extras	Understand ServiceNow releases and upgrades If you're not already on the latest ServiceNow release, we strongly recommend that you upgrade before you go live. By upgrading, you get new ServiceNow innovations into the hands of your users faster, gain access to the latest performance and security enhancements, and ensure that support is there when you need it. To make your upgrade smooth and successful, check out these upgrade resources.
Bookmark these resources! ServiceNow Customer Success Center -- The CSC is a one-stop that gives you instant access to proven methodologies, leading practices, expert insights, and advice. NowSupport -- You can get technical issues resolved quickly by contacting our support team comprised of ServiceNow employees with deep product knowledge and real-world experience. Read more here on how to use support.