Mystery Devices...

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...

What IS That Thing?

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...

New Feature: Chunky Pings...

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 ...

First Video for creating a Delegate.

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...

A Question of Scope...

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 — it's way more than they expected, and having all that...

New Feature: UPS Discovery...

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 ...

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...