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...
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 ...
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, ...
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...
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". ...
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". ...
I've written about serial numbers before, and even mentioned the invalid
serial number table (Discovery Definition → Invalid Serial Numbers).
Like the soldiers at right take care of the bad guys to ...
You've probably heard that astronomers have changed Pluto's
classification from "planet" to a mere "solar system body". Though this
happened a couple years ago, there's still considerable debate about...
Many folks use Discovery as the sole means of populating their CMDB in
Service-now. But if you're one of those who also imports items into your
CMDB, or who manually enters CIs into your CMDB, CI Cons...
Have you wondered how Discovery can figure out that one system (perhaps
an accounting application) is related to another (such as the database
used by the accounting application)? I've been asked this...
There's an old saying with several variations, most of which are about
like this:You can pick your friends, but you can't pick your
relations.For instance, I'm pretty certain the fellow at right is
re...
Port probes… Doesn't this sound like something unpleasant, possibly
involving rectal thermometers? Don't worry, they're not as bad as all
that. In fact, they're pretty darned useful — and quite fundam...
Frankly, we've been quite surprised just how much NetWare is still
running around enterprises. Quite a few of you have asked if it might be
possible for us to support NetWare — even if all we did was ...
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 — 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 — one that you could use to unambiguou...