Poor Man's CMDB...

A reader asks:I have a case where we will not be considering Enterprise Discovery for a while, and have done a CMDB manual load-in of our desktop fleet. I was just wondering if you would have any poin...

Hey iPhone users!

If any of you out there use iPhones, you can add a very cool looking 'Service-now' icon to your iPhone Home Page which will let you get direct access to your Service-now instance through Safari! (Of c...

Diving Into ... What?

Well, I've managed to blog my way through the entire list of questions that I've accumulated from our Discovery users. Are there other topics (whether Discovery or on our overall product) that you'd l...

Take Control of Your MID Server's CPU Consumption!

Continuing yesterday's theme (by special request), today I'll show you how to control your MID Server's CPU consumption. Again, when you first install a MID Server it is configured to consume a "reaso...

Take Control of Your MID Server's Memory!

This Great White Shark is looking very happy about the resources in his vicinity. Aren't you glad that you're not the resource?When you first install a MID server to enable Discovery in your environme...

Discovery Scalability...

A perceptive customer couched a question to me in an interesting fashion. She noted that Discovery populated the CMDB automatically, which was essentially the same thing as hiring enough people to do ...

Clashing Date Formats: the Fix...

If your Service-now instance is configured to use a custom date format, you may have noticed that your MID server's Started and Stopped times are rather odd looking (navigate to Discovery → MID Serv...

Some JavaScript Pointers...

Continuing yesterday's theme — several folks have asked me where they can go to learn more about JavaScript, which the Service-now product uses extensively, both on the instance and on the web browser...

Some SNMP Pointers...

Several folks have asked me where they can go to learn more about SNMP — and most especially about MIBs, OIDs, and other SNMP exotica. You could consult with the SNMP Guru (at right). Or you could do ...

How Does Discovery Find CI Names?

Plus a question for y'all, at the end of this post...A few days ago I posted about controlling host names, and this led to another question: How exactly is Discovery finding the names of configuration...

Some Details About Credentials...

A security-minded customer asked a very good question the other day: how exactly are credentials stored on the Service-now instance and on MID servers, and how are they transmitted from one to the oth...

Controlling Host Names...

Discovery automatically names your CIs by using the host name. Ordinarily, Discovery finds the host name by a reverse lookup of a CI's IP address in DNS. However, if a CI has no DNS name and it happen...

Diving Into CI Relationships...

The other day I was on the phone with a customer who wanted to write a business rule that understood CI relationships. In particular, he was trying to make a business rule that could tell if a CI had ...

Here a Table, There a Table...

"Why does a list of computers show servers?" Have you asked yourself a question like that? I've heard several variations of this from our customers, and when I've poked at it a bit, it generally turns...

Nominate Service-now.com for SDI vendor of the year

Please take a a couple of minutes to nominate Service-now.com for the Service Desk Institute vendor of the year. The nomination form can be found here (nominations now closed).[flickr-photo:id=3194869...

Estimate Your Geekitude...

How geeky are you? A friend passed along this little test, the intent of which is to estimate just how much of an IT and programming geek you are. For each of the web sites below, give yourself three ...

It's Out!

Our Winter 2009 release is out — woo hoo! It's got all sorts of spiffy new things, but here I'm going to focus on the Discovery enhancements and changes. Read the change notes for the entire release, ...

Diving Into WMI...

The other day, one of our customers asked me "What the heck is this WMI stuff you keep blathering about?" To someone like me who's been working in the dark and dusty recesses of major operating system...

MID Server Capacity...

How much Discovery work can a single MID server do? This is one of the questions people frequently ask when implementing Discovery, and what they really want is an answer like this: "13,214 devices". ...

Diving Into System Identifiers...

If you've done any scripting to customize your Service-now instance, you've probably run into a system identifier (sys_id) or two — those funny-looking values like "46e2fee9a9fe19810049b49dee0daf58". ...