What are the basic difference among Discovery, ServiceWatch & Event Management?

monasingh · ‎04-07-2016

Hi All,

What are the basic difference among Discovery, Service Mapping & Event Management?

And how does Discovery and Event Management enhance Business Mapping?

(I'll ask more questions based on your responses )

Thanks,

Mona

Tony Branton · ‎04-25-2016

Hi Mona,

Discovery performs what we refer to as "horizontal" discovery of IT infrastructure and applications connected to TCP/IP networks. Given an IP address range and a set of credentials Discovery will scan each IP address, identifying and classifying devices or hosts it receives a response from. For each discovered device/host, Discovery adds a CI to the ServiceNow CMDB, or updates existing CIs with new information. Discovery can also be configured to identify dependencies between applications, creating application dependency maps that can be graphically viewed in Dependency Views. The data returned by Discovery is often used for Asset Management, or other ITIL processes (Incident, Change, etc) involving an individual CI.

Service Mapping performs a top-down, "vertical" discovery and mapping of a business service using one or more entry points. The difference between Service Mapping and Discovery is that Service Mapping only discovers the infrastructure and applications directly supporting a business service and maps their relationships. Discovery on the other hand discovers all the infrastructure and applications it can find but does not relate anything to business services - you can compare Discovery's approach to a shotgun (broad coverage) and Service Mapping to a sniper's rifle (pin-point and precise). Once a business service has been mapped , Service Mapping performs routine re-discoveries to detect changes, such as the addition of removal of servers in clusters, updated software, changed configuration files, etc. Service maps created by Service Mapping are often used for impact analysis in incident and change management - for example, you may be planning to upgrade a database server and you want to understand which business services would be impacted by the change.

The Event Management application consolidates events integrated from different monitoring tools (e.g. SCOM, Nagios, SolarWinds, etc), performs processing of the events to produce actionable alerts. Alerts can be [automatically] related to CIs and if the CIs are related to business services then the severity of the alerts can be used to detect the impact on the business services. Event Management is a consumer of service maps created and updated by Service Mapping. Since you know how the CIs are related to the business service, it's possible to perform root cause analysis to identify which CI is the probable cause of a service outage or disruption. Also, by knowing the criticality of the business service it's possible to better prioritise which alerts to focus on fixing first. You can use Alert Rules to automate the creation of incidents (or other tasks) and automate the remediation (or repair) of problems reported by alerts.

Discovery, Service Mapping and Event Management are all licensed by node, with a node defined as a physical or virtual server.

In response to your follow-up questions:

Service Mapping creates service maps and will create a CI in the CMDB representing a business service.
The business service CI does not consume a node license, since the business service is not a physical or virtual server.
When you enable Service Mapping, it enables the Event Management and Service Mapping Core plug-in which is a set of components shared by Service Mapping and Event Management. It does not enable the Event Management application (this is a separate plugin).
Service Mapping can be used without Event Management.
Although Discovery is used by Service Mapping, you can license just Service Mapping and include the nodes that support the business services you want to map.
If you want to monitor the availability status of a business service then you need Event Management. Service Mapping only discovers and maps a business service and then identifies changes to the CIs and relationships - it does not detect if a server or component is down.

Reach out to your local ServiceNow sales representative if you need more information.

Hope this helps.

View solution in original post

Daniel Draes · ‎04-07-2016

Well, on a glance.... I'm sure there are people with more elaborate explanations on this....

Discovery: is a vertical scan of your infrastructure trying to find all discoverable configuration items (servers, routes, printers, etc...). Discovery will bring limited relationship information.

Service Mapping: is a horizontal discovery. You start with a business service and (once configured) ServiceMapping will follow the services configuration to it's lowest config item (usually some SAN...). This gives you a complete and actual picture of your service configuration.

Event Management: collects events from an external monitoring solution and relates them to your CI's - with some additional logic to rate/qualify these events. Using Event Management and Service Mapping you can identify which service is affected by an event.

monasingh · ‎04-07-2016

Thank you Fogg for your Answer

i have following doubts:

1. Service Mapping maps business and create nodes on a graphical presentation.

Does these Nodes are counted as Licence subscription?
How Business Service Mapping Node is different from CI. Or is it a CI on CMDB Database?

2. When we enable Service Mapping plugin on Geneva, it also enables Discovery and Event Management.

Is it possible to implement Service Mapping/Watch without discovery and Event Management.
Will ServiceNow start charging for Discovery and Event Management tool even if we do not use it?
If we run discovery as part of business mapping implementation, will there be additional charges for it or it will be covered with Watch/Mapping licenses cost (Nodes count)?
Does Business Mapping/Watch check the Business Node status real time? E.g. an IT component is down, will it immediately reflect it in Business Service Map?

Thanks,

Mona

Daniel Draes · ‎04-08-2016

Hi Mona,

for all licensing or pricing topics I would recommend to speak to your sales rep of ServiceNow. I am a technical guy and this is out of my boundaries.

As per the other questions:

- Yes, the nodes discovered by ServiceMapping are CIs. Same as from Discovery as it is using the same technology (starting with the Geneva Release)

- You can implement ServiceMapping w/o Event or Discovery. ServiceMapping will use some Discovery functionality though.

- ServiceMapping will unfortunately not watch your systems in real time. We would recommend to add a monitoring solution which will be used to send events to ServiceNow in case of a failure.

tanaji · ‎04-11-2019

Service Mapping is top-down discovery means Vertical