Windows computer to Personal Computer in Discovery

[doug_schulze]

Hey everyone,

Have been hearing rumblings about how the Discovery application can use the Personal Computer (cmdb_ci_pc_hardware) over the out of the box, Computer (cmdb_ci_computer) class. Seem there are a lot of our asset friends out there that would prefer the latter over the former. In fact, I have been working with my fellow Ranger @Daniel Slocum around this focus and you should be seeing a blog from him about his work on the asset side in short order.

With this in mind, I wanted to see what it would take to modify and extend discovery to use this class over the out-of-the-box config, and instead of typing up a blog that would be tl;dr, I figured I'd just do a video to walk you through the steps and hope that it helps you see the process that can inspire ways that you can do similar things with other classes and as always, I do try to show you the 'why' behind things are a particular way. Especially when it comes to probes and sensors and adapting to patterns.

Some key takeaways I hope you end up with...

1. Remembering that patterns are class-specific, you have to take into account no matter what the classifier says.
2. Always consider pre and post scripts when dealing with patterns.
3. While I don't get into it here, always think about identification and reconciliation (IRE) rules and my arch nemesis hosting and containment rules.
4. You own this pattern, it won't be updated, you'll have to rinse and repeat the process if and when updates come for the out-of-box computer pattern.
5. Test, test, test before putting it into production.

As a friendly reminder, this is not supported, it is local customization but with enough support maybe we can have this included Out of Box...

Attached is an update set and hope "Computer to PC Hardware"  video can be of service.

Update: If you have Linux laptops that you also want to include in the new class you also need to apply this work as well for the classifier and instead of using probes/sensors (which I still recommend), then replicate the same process around the pattern duplication as I show in the video but with the Linux pattern..

Secondly, as Alex mentions in the idea portal link, take into consideration if you are using SG connectors that are bringing records into the CMDB that discovery might find as well for the computer class. My work here focuses purely on Discovery but do consider other data sources as well.