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...

Anatomy of a Discovery...

What actually happens when a Discovery kicks off? In this post, I'll follow the process step-by-step for a Windows workstation (or laptop). The process is very similar for other kinds of computers or ...

Back to the grind

With the Quarterly Business Review and Internal Technical Training session behind us, it is back to the day job.Continuing to hear great feedback on the new community portal, thanks for all of you who...

A Great Tool in Tough Times...

On the way to work this morning, I pondered a conversation I'd had over the weekend with Mark R., a friend who is responsible for IT at a medium-sized company in the financial services industry. Mark ...

Tech Training Sessions, Day 2 morning

Here are some pictures of the Technical Training session.Can you find your favorite PS or SC resource?[flickr-photoset:id=72157608341040893,size=m]

Status report

Hi everybody,First of all, thanks for all the great feedback on the new 'forums', which you are becoming aware of, is far more than just forums!It has been a long road getting to this point, and there...

OID, vey!

Many of the people who are responsible for running Discovery aren't very familiar with the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). The seemingly endless stream of acronyms (SNMP, OID, MIB, etc.) as...

SNC Customer Walkthrough Videos and Documentation

We are still in the process of developing SNC for rollout shooting for a mid November completion. We will use screen video and screenshot documentation to walk our ITIL and Employee users through usin...