Advanced vs. Basic Schedules...

If you've been poking around in the Discovery application, you may have noticed an intriguing little box on the schedule form: the "Discovery Type". It gives you three choices: Basic, Advanced, and Ne...

Service-now.com folks on Twitter

So if you're into Twitter you will probably find this list of Service-now.com employees who tweet useful. If you have no idea what Twitter is, here is a definition (in 140 characters or less) Twitter ...

An ITSM workout to outlast the economy

Service-now.com was graciously invited by Mark Storace, IT Service Management Professional Association founder and CEO, to provide the vendor spotlight for the ITSMP-a Q408 newsletter. We jumped at th...

Diving into Windows Credentials...

You may have heard this little saying:"There's a right way, a wrong way, and a Microsoft way."That applies to security credentials as much as it does to other areas. Microsoft chose to go their own wa...

User Groups are rolling!

Couple of very cool conversations took place today regarding local user groups!I was on a call with the Minnesota Local User Group which has planned a half day event in mid December to host a lunch, c...

Discovery Schedule Tactics...

We're often asked setting up Discovery schedules. What are the "best practices" for them? Do we have some guidelines? Or even just some tips and hints?Why, yes we do!The starting point for a discussio...

A Question of Identity...

Most of the time Discovery thinks of each IP address as representing a unique device, but there are times when this simple approach doesn't work. For example, consider the case of a workstation whose ...

Diving into Discovery IP Ranges...

Each morning I drive down out of the mountains of eastern San Diego County to the coastal plains (where the wooden spaceship is docked). This morning I was treated to a scene of sublime beauty — a nea...

Diving Into Printers...

One of the many kinds of devices that Discovery will find and explore are network printers. By "network printers" we mean those printers that connect directly to the network (rather than to a computer...

Global Text Search - coming soon to an instance near you; feedback wanted

We're targeting our Global Text Search capability for the Winter 2009 release (in two months). Since no new feature just "pops up" from the aether, fully formed and complete, it's obviously a work in ...

Managing MID Server Resource Consumption...

MID servers are lightweight Java processes that run on servers in your enterprise. We call them "lightweight" because they require relatively little resources on whatever server you're running them on...

Discovery's IP Address Table...

Buried within the Discovery application (at Discovery → IP Addresses) is a table that contains a lot of useful information. It's a place where Discovery remembers some things about past discoveries,...

Diving Into ECC Queue Messages...

What are these mysterious "messages" that you keep hearing about in Discovery? And what on earth is the "ECC Queue"?The ECC Queue is simply a database table, nothing more. Discovery uses rows in this ...

Pinging in the Rain...

We actually had a bit of rain last night. If you live in the chaparral of Southern California, and it's fire season (which it is right now), this is a cause for celebration! I was testing some changes...

CI Relationships...

I've had a lot of questions from people about Configuration Item (CI) relationships. What exactly are they? How do they work? What causes Discovery to create them?Good questions!From a human perspecti...

Diving Into Serial Numbers...

Serial numbers are an important notion in Discovery — they are the best way we have to unambiguously identify a particular device or system, even if it changes IP address or location. Unfortunately fo...

To Those Who Were Wondering...

Several readers asked if this is a photo of me in my youth (back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth).No. It is not.The photo comes from this post on Living Alaska.

An Unexpected Discovery...

One fine day, not so very long ago, I helped some folks install a MID server so they could try out Discovery. The company was already using Service-now for Incident, and was now considering using the ...

To Delete or not to Delete...

Some questions I hear often relate to CMDB items that have disappeared out in the real world, but still exist in the database. Perhaps it's a server that was taken out of service, or a laptop that was...

Those Sensible Sensors...

Discovery's sensors are where a lot of the discovery action is. Each sensor is responsible for analyzing the information returned by a particular kind of probe, and then updating (or creating, if nece...