ECC Queue Tales: Good Credentials Gone Bad...

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...

New Feature: Mac Support...

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...

New Feature: Probe Report...

The next release includes a spiffy new report that serves several purposes — watching the progress of a discovery, troubleshooting any problems, and analyzing discovery performance. It's called the Pr...

Diving Into SNMP System OID Classifiers...

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...

What Does "Agentless" Mean?

You've probably heard that our Discovery product is "agentless" — 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...

What Exactly IS a MID Server, Anyway?

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...

It's A Secret!

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 ...

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 ...