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

[monasingh]

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

[Anmol8]

Yes, It is called vertical because it only focus on the ci's which are associated to a specific service. Not all the ci's connected or having relationship with other ci's.

Thanks,

Hope this helps.

[Tony Branton · Accepted solution]

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.

[Runjay Patel]

Check out this video, it will clear all your doubts and help you to understand Service Mapping queries in details.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VN33mZiHBj0&t=1s&ab_channel=ServiceNowHelpdesk

It help you to understand below points.

• Service Mapping Overview
• Service Mapping Plugins Required
• Service Mapping roles management
• Service mapping credentials for different ci type
• Verify that Service Mapping is set up properly (Readiness)
• Service Mapping setup step by step
• Service Mapping troubleshootings

Please mark reply as Helpful/Correct, if applicable. Thanks!!

[Runjay Patel]

Check out this video, it will clear all your doubts and help you to understand Discovery queries in details.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30JbWVsusyE&t=10s&ab_channel=ServiceNowHelpdesk

It help you to understand below points.

• Discovery Overview
• Discovery prerequisite
• Understanding Discovery Phases in details
• Discovery credentials and IP Affinity
• Mid Server Management with Cluster and Load Balancer
• Schedule jobs
• Set up discovery from scratch to end
• Live implementation with real world data.
• Troubleshooting on various aspects
• Many more other issue related to mid server, CIs
• Cloud discovery
• Service Mapping

Please mark reply as Helpful/Correct, if applicable. Thanks!!