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Quick Start Guide for Discovery

Syed Kazmi
ServiceNow Employee
ServiceNow Employee

10 hours ago - edited 6 hours ago

This Quick Start Guide gives you all the information you need for successful implementation of the ServiceNow Discovery application, along with proven guidance, best practices, and links to key resources.

 

Overview

Here's an overview of the topics we will cover in this guide: 

  • What is Discovery
  • Key features
  • Benefits
  • Business outcomes
  • Start your implementation journey
  • Best practices
  • Learning
  • Useful resources

 

What is Discovery

ServiceNow Discovery is an application that continuously scans, identifies, and classifies all the components in your IT infrastructure to help you get full visibility and create and maintain an accurate and up-to-date Configuration Management Database (CMDB). The application discovers both physical and logical components, including virtual machines, servers, storage, databases, applications, and more.

 

Key features

  • Efficiently populates your ServiceNow CMDB using both agentless and agent-based discovery methods.
  • Discovers physical and logical components, including virtual machines, servers, storage, databases, applications, endpoints, and running processes.
  • Utilizes application fingerprinting to discover custom applications using supervised machine learning algorithms.
  • Provides Application Dependency Mapping (ADM) to identify upstream and downstream dependencies at the TCP port and process level.

 

Benefits

The ServiceNow Discovery application unlocks a broad range of benefits across the organization by providing comprehensive visibility and context to IT environments.

  • IT Asset Management: Gain visibility of hardware & software across your operational estate
  • IT Service Management: Increase efficiency and reduce risk when planning changes
  • IT Operations Management: Prioritize response based on business impact
  • Cloud: Gain visibility of cloud resources and align spend to business initiatives
  • Enterprise Architecture: Streamline buildout of application portfolio
  • Customer Service Management: Prioritize response based on customer impact
  • Certificate Management/Firewall Workflows: Eliminate outages due to expired certificates/misconfigured firewall policies
  • DevOps: Ensure governance and traceability of the CI/CD process
  • Risk: Align technology risks with the business
  • Security: Prioritize response based on business impact

 

Business outcomes

  • Accelerate your multi-cloud strategy: Get real-time visibility of your multi-cloud and virtualized on-premises infrastructure, including out-of-the-box support for Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google GCP, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, VMware, Citrix, Kubernetes, and more.
  • Drive operational excellence: Works seamlessly with other ServiceNow products to help you fix outages faster, strengthen change processes, reduce risk, optimize infrastructure spend, and minimize software compliance issues.
  • Regulatory compliance: Comply with regulatory mandates such as MRA, DORA, and more.

 

Start your implementation journey

 

Step 1: Prepare

Step 1a: Network topology and architecture

Begin by collaborating with network architects to gain a thorough understanding of the network topology and architecture, enabling effective planning for the placement and quantity of required MID Servers. Proceed to submit requests for the necessary virtual machines (VMs) after this assessment is complete. See the MID Server Best Practices whitepaper on Now Create for guidance on creating MID Servers.

 

Step 1b: Credentials and permissions

Discovery administrators are encouraged to collaborate with various engineering teams — including Windows, *NIX, Network, Network Security, Database Administrators, and Middleware — to assess the specific permission requirements for each technology targeted for discovery. This process enables them to present a well-founded case, secure leadership approval, and appropriately submit access requests.

See Discovery commands for probes and patterns and Prerequisites for performing top-down discovery using Service Mapping for more information on permissions required for Discovery on Linux, UNIX, Windows, and more.

 

Step 1c: Security considerations

Consult with the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) organization to determine whether credentials may be stored on the platform or if external credential storage is required. Additionally, confirm whether security approval will be granted for executing commands that necessitate elevated privileges.

Step 2: Set up

Step 2a: Request Discovery

  1. Discovery is available as a separate subscription from the rest of the ServiceNow AI Platform and requires the Discovery (com.snc.discovery) plugin. Contact your ServiceNow account manager or sales representative to purchase a Discovery subscription. If you already own Discovery, submit a Now Support request to activate the Discovery plugin.
  2. The following additional plugins are recommended for installation: Discovery and Service Mapping Patterns, Pattern Designer Enhancements, CMDB CI Class Model, ITOM Content Service, Visibility Content, and the External Credential Storage and Management Application.

 

Step 2b: Set up Discovery

After you activate the Discovery application, you have two options to get started:

  • (Recommended) Guided Setup: Use this method if you want a guided experience for setting up everything you need to use Discovery, including a MID Server and Discovery Admin Workspace.
  • Without Guided Setup: Use this method if you want to set up each component of the setup separately. You can configure MID Servers, credentials, and roles separately, then configure one of the discovery types from the Discovery Schedule.

 

Step 2c: Install MID Server

  1. Understand implementation options: Analyze the number of MID servers needed for Discovery and identify the number of servers, network devices, and data centers, geographies that need to be supported, data sources to be integrated, and the cloud vendor infrastructure that needs to be supported.
  2. Set up MID Server: Download and install the MID Server on the host machine, test the connection, and then validate the MID Server.
  3. Configure MID Server capabilities: Define specific functions of a MID Server within an IP address range and ensure at least one capability is assigned to each MID Server used by Discovery. Available capabilities include IBM, DNS, SNMP, Azure, VMware, and more.

Note: Azure Cloud Discovery requires API-based access using service accounts or IAM roles, enabling metadata retrieval, tag-based mapping, and integration with cloud-native tools like Agent Client Collector (ACC-V). It supports dynamic resource inventory, container discovery, and certificate management. In contrast, on-prem IP-based Discovery relies on agentless protocols such as SSH, SNMP, and WMI, requiring credentials with administrative or sudo access for Linux, UNIX, and Windows systems. It enables deep inspection of hardware, OS, software, and network dependencies, often using MID Servers deployed within the local network.

 

Step 2d: Create and test your credentials

  1. Create and test the credentials that Discovery requires to access hardware and software in your network.

 

Step 3: Configure

Step 3a: Configuring Discovery

Configure the elements that Discovery requires to investigate your network, such as credentials, schedules, and IP addresses. The Discovery Admin Workspace Settings page allows you to easily customize and manage high-level Discovery properties so they're tailored to meet your specific needs.

 

Step 3b: Discovery properties

Discovery properties allow you to control several aspects of the horizontal discovery process. The Discovery Admin Workspace Tuning Home page provides tools to assess instance health through configured checks and displays failed checks by priority, category, and suite.

 

Step 3c: Discovery behavior

Create a Discovery behavior to determine which probes are launched and which MID Server is used. Discovery behaviors are essential to optimize the discovery process for resource utilization, protocol management, and improved accuracy. Use behaviors when devices in your network are running multiple protocols, or if you need to ensure that specific MID Servers are used for specific discovery tasks.

Step 4 - Use

Step 4a: Schedule a horizontal discovery

A discovery schedule determines what horizontal discovery searches for, when it runs, and which MID Servers are used. Create a discovery schedule for your local environment or a schedule for discovering the resources in your cloud service account. The Discovery Admin Workspace Schedules page provides a single place to monitor Discovery performance, efficiently manage schedules and statuses, and set up new IP-based or Cloud Discovery schedules

 

Step 4b: Run a Quick Discovery

Quick Discovery, or DiscoverNow, allows an administrator to run a CI Configuration discovery on a single IP address without requiring a schedule.

 

Step 4c: Discovery status

The Discovery status provides a summary of a Discovery launched from a schedule. You can also cancel a Discovery that is in progress from the status form. The Discovery Admin Workspace Insights page provides access to specialized widgets, dashboards, and reports to leverage your organization's IT operations management and infrastructure monitoring, taking advantage of Discovery's capabilities for improved operational visibility and infrastructure health.

 

Step 4d: Explore Cloud Discovery

Cloud Discovery enables IT departments to collect detailed information about their cloud-based infrastructure by finding resources in major cloud service providers such as Amazon AWS Cloud, Microsoft Azure Cloud, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), IBM Cloud Platform, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

 

Step 4e: Discovery monitoring and issue resolution

Learn how to monitor the progress of your discoveries and how to configure the system to aggregate performance metrics that are important to you. The Discovery Admin Workspace Diagnostics page helps you prioritize and address errors and anomalies in IP-based and Cloud Discovery schedules. See the Discovery Troubleshooting Guide for a collection of Discovery troubleshooting guides.

 

Best practices

  • Discovery - Process Guide provides a comprehensive overview of how the Discovery process is configured within the ServiceNow platform. The guide details the principles, roles, responsibilities, and phases involved in the Discovery process.
  • Discovery - Project Workshop Presentation guides ServiceNow implementers through the process of setting up and managing the ServiceNow application. It covers various aspects of the implementation, including project success factors, resources required, and the discovery process. 
  • Populate and maintain your CMDB with Discovery - Success Playbook outlines a four-stage process for setting up ServiceNow Discovery, including setting goals, configuring MID Servers, creating a credentials strategy, and automating discovery with schedules.

 

Learning

 

Useful resources

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Last update:
6 hours ago
Updated by:
ServiceNow Employee