when to create or modify probes/patterns ?

Ravish Shetty · ‎03-28-2019

hi all,

we are entering into implementing CI discovery for our organization and as a developer, I was curious in knowing my scope of work on the technical side.

do I need to worry about creating probes or patterns? I am under the assumption that we do not need to configure these unless we have a very specific thing to be discovered. how do we come to know that we now need to modify or create our own probes/patterns?

what is the skill set needed to create one?

Xavier Cordero · ‎03-28-2019

Hello Ravish,

Custom probes/sensors and/or patterns are needed in the case that your organization either tracks cmdb classes which are not OOTB tracked cmdb classes by ServiceNow (rare), or in the case that your organization tracks additional attributes on the machines which are not tracked OOTB by Discovery (also rare, but less so in some cases if you already had other software tracking tools, although in most cases it gets discovered that the additional attributes that they were tracking were not really being used, and that discovery is tracking many more attributes than the other softwares that they have). An example of the additional attribute, is if your organization wants to extract the security status of the windows machines, which you could then do by adding a WMI Path for Win32_SystemEnclosure.SecurityStatus.

In most cases, the attributes collected OOTB by ServiceNow discovery are more than enough, and as such it is unlikely that you'll need to worry about tracking custom attributes on top of all of the attributes that you retrieve OOTB with Discovery. Having said that, knowing how-to is always good just in case you do need to collect a new attribute or 2, although as stated, it is not the most typical scenario for custom attribute tracking to be needed.

The skill set required to create custom probes/sensors or patterns (patterns are recommendable over probes sensors in my opinion since they are the new way of doing things), would be those of the classic system administrators for workstations etc., such as WMI.

View solution in original post

sachin_namjoshi · ‎03-28-2019

Please see below nice blog on when and how to use discovery patterns vs probes.

https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_blog&sys_id=12fc26a5dbd0dbc01dcaf3231f96191c

Regards,

Sachin

Xavier Cordero · ‎03-28-2019

Hello Ravish,

Custom probes/sensors and/or patterns are needed in the case that your organization either tracks cmdb classes which are not OOTB tracked cmdb classes by ServiceNow (rare), or in the case that your organization tracks additional attributes on the machines which are not tracked OOTB by Discovery (also rare, but less so in some cases if you already had other software tracking tools, although in most cases it gets discovered that the additional attributes that they were tracking were not really being used, and that discovery is tracking many more attributes than the other softwares that they have). An example of the additional attribute, is if your organization wants to extract the security status of the windows machines, which you could then do by adding a WMI Path for Win32_SystemEnclosure.SecurityStatus.

In most cases, the attributes collected OOTB by ServiceNow discovery are more than enough, and as such it is unlikely that you'll need to worry about tracking custom attributes on top of all of the attributes that you retrieve OOTB with Discovery. Having said that, knowing how-to is always good just in case you do need to collect a new attribute or 2, although as stated, it is not the most typical scenario for custom attribute tracking to be needed.

The skill set required to create custom probes/sensors or patterns (patterns are recommendable over probes sensors in my opinion since they are the new way of doing things), would be those of the classic system administrators for workstations etc., such as WMI.

Ravish Shetty · ‎04-03-2019

thanks Xavier