What is CMDB discovery and what is the difference between CMDB and CMDB Discovery ?

padhu1 · ‎01-23-2018

Hi friends,

Thanks in Advance.

HarshTimes · ‎01-25-2018

Hi Padhu

CMDB is a deep sea,a lot of things to understand. To understand it I will suggest to go for some videos on youtube or check the servicenow docs.Below link will be helpful to understand.

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/helsinki-servicenow-platform/page/product/configuration-managemen...

Ask the Expert : Real-Time CMDB with Ben Yukich - YouTube

mayank_ihs · ‎04-24-2018

Hello Padhu,

CMDB stands for Configuration Management Database which is a collection and pool all the assets a company owns and its a way things get organised in ServiceNow. It is nothing but a collection of tables and interconnected relationships.

On the other hand Discovery is a separate licensed (volume/user based) and its the process (automated) once set up which gets/ updates the CMDB with the recently updated/added CI items in your company.

I'll break it down in this way. Your company incorporated a new windows machine which they are going to use as a IIS front end Web Server and it has been powered on and put in the network.

What discovery does is it runs probes (automated scripts) to find out the device by looking up the IP in the network and it drills down the information of the machine or the key attributes and updates the CMDB Tables with the Information like the version of the app server, the make, model , CPU, RAM onboard etc etc.. (long list)

So, It makes it easy for the IT Service/operations management team to not store the list of CI's in some static workbooks/ excel and provides an automated way of keeping the CMDB up to date.

Please find the link below which can hep you understand the things better and how discovery works in detail.

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/helsinki-it-operations-management/page/product/discovery/concept/c_Discovery.html

https://soundcloud.com/servicenow-techbytes/episode5-discovery