If you're managing a bunch of switches and routers, there's a good
chance that most of them are made by Cisco. In that case, one of the
things you'll likely care about is the IOS version. Out-of-the-b...
In a conversation a few days ago, one of our customers said to me, a
little wistfully, "I really like Service-now, but I sure wish there was
a way for me to see the exact things I want to see..."Well,...
If you've used Discovery at all, you're familiar with the Discovery
Status form ā but you may not realize that there's another, deeper layer
of information available to you. This layer gives you the h...
Thanks for the training!
I've discussed the ECC Queue before; it's the way that messages are sent
from the Service-now instance to MID servers, and vice versa. Today I'm
going to talk about a detail concerning these ECC Queue...
Hopefully you're very careful when you start up a chainsaw, get behind
the controls of a fighter jet, or pick up your shotgun. It's obvious in
all those cases that you're controlling something very po...
A serial number is such a simple concept. If you didn't know any better,
you'd think that each computer or other device would have a unique
number assigned to it ā one that you could use to unambiguou...
Yesterday I was on a call with a customer who had a tough problem:
Discovery was working fine except for network gear, and even with heroic
efforts they'd been unable to find the problem. They'd ident...
In recent months we've started hearing about Macs from our customers.
Macs are starting to appear in the corporate world in larger numbers,
and no longer just in marketing and graphics departments. Th...
The next release includes a spiffy new report that serves several
purposes ā watching the progress of a discovery, troubleshooting any
problems, and analyzing discovery performance. It's called the Pr...
I've mentioned before that you can use the SNMP system OID for a device
to classify it more accurately. Today I'll run through an actual
example. At right is a screen shot of a printer in the CMDB, as...
You've probably heard that our Discovery product is "agentless" ā but
what does that actually mean? What sort of agent doesn't Discovery
have?Well, it's certainly true that there is no secret agent ma...
Yesterday I was talking with a long-time customer who was just starting
to think about using the CMDB, and because of that they were also
looking at Discovery. One of the first questions asked was whe...
I spoke this morning with a company that is deploying Discovery, and one
of the topics of our conversation was this: how do we deal with a
situation where the networking folks tightly restrict access ...
When Discovery goes out and explores your network, most of the time it
has no problem figuring out what's what. But sometimes it will find
"things" out there that it cannot identify. What do you do th...
When Discovery explores your networks, one of the methods it uses is the
Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). When a device at an IP
address responds to SNMP, the first thing Discovery has to do...
Some enterprises have their networks divided into broad,
sparsely-populated IP ranges. One enterprise we know uses a /18 (like
10.21.0.0/18) network for each of their locations, large or small. A /18
...
This is my first attempt at videos. The only thing I have done is
checked with a few of my Service Desk techs to see if it made their ears
bleed listening to me. I am still working on fixing the audio...
There's too much information!I've seen this reaction several times when
people get their first view of what Discovery finds and puts in the CMDB
ā it's way more than they expected, and having all that...
The next release of our project includes many spiffy new features in
Discovery, one of which is the discovery of manageable Uninterruptible
Power Supplies (UPSs). The screenshot at right shows what a ...