I've seen this reaction several times when people get their first view of what Discovery finds and puts in the CMDB — it's way more than they expected, and having all that information viewable by their service desk staff worries them. Sometimes the worry is related to security or privacy, but most commonly the worry is about overloading the service desk staff with information.
So the next question I get is "How can I reduce the scope of what Discovery discovers?"
Most of the time, actually "scoping down" Discovery is the wrong way to solve this problem. The first approach to consider is to reduce the scope of what you make visible, and to whom you make it visible. The CMDB works just like the rest of the Service-now product — you control what fields are visible on any form (and to whom), what related lists are shown, and what fields are shown on those related lists. You're in control!
For example, suppose you decided that your service desk staff really don't need to see the running processes Discovery found on servers, but your escalation team should be able to see them. One way to accomplish that would be to have two form views, enabled by the roles the user has. This same kind of control also works (of course!) on the forms for related lists. If you thought it was a bad idea to let your management see the MAC addresses on workstation network adapters, you could easily make a form view to hide them.
Are there ever any situations where it actually makes more sense to scope down the Discovery, rather than what's viewable? I've only run into one plausible case so far: a customer who had a few small offices in far-flung places, each connected to the WAN by ISDN (slow and expensive). They had a need to reduce the amount of traffic generated by Discovery, and initially their thought was to scope down Discovery to the bare minimum of "must have" information. Two things happened along the way, however: (1) their notion of "bare mininum" kept creeping closer and closer to "everything", and (2) when they actually measured the traffic Discovery generated, it was much smaller than they had been imagining. So in the end, they just decided to run discovery on those offices less often, without scoping it down at all.
If you find yourself having that "Too much information!" (TMI) kind of feeling, put your energy into scoping down what's visible to the various roles you're using. If you come across a TMI problem that you can't figure out how to solve that way, let us know about it — we'll find a way to make it work for you...
