discovery implementation in phases

[Ravish Shetty]

ours is a mid size company and our CMDB (manually entered) presently is under 10K.

I am looking for best practices for our future discovery implementation.

Should we do a phased approach? If yes then how many phases should we have and what should be ideally covered in each of these phases? 

[Alberto Consonn]

Hi,

I would suggest you to plan the discovery following the video in the official documentation below:

Planning for discovery

Then, start the implementation using the below guided setup:

Guided Setup > ITOM Guided Setup

Hope this will be helpful for your need.

If I have answered your question, please mark my response as correct so that others with the same question in the future can find it quickly and that it gets removed from the Unanswered list.

Thank you

Cheers
Alberto

[Alberto Consonn]

Any update on this?

If I have answered your question, please mark my response as correct so that others with the same question in the future can find it quickly and that it gets removed from the Unanswered list.

Thank you

Cheers
Alberto

[Ravish Shetty]

Alberto, it was not quite what I was looking for. What I need to know is from veterans who had implemented discovery and who tried to scan everything at once and were overwhelmed with the response. I want to know from that if going small would be a better approach and if we should just focus on discovering certain attributes or devices first instead of a big bang. I keep hearing that a phased approach is good but I want to know what are those phases.

[User177031]

Hi Ravish,

Most of the companies follow the horizontal discovery method as below.

Horizontal discovery phases

The phases of horizontal discovery are:

Discovery follows these phases:

• Scanning

  Discovery sends a probed called Shazzam to the network to see if commonly used ports are open and if these ports can respond to queries. For example, if Shazzam finds a device that responds on port 135, Discovery knows that it is a Windows server.

• Classification

  If Discovery finds devices or computers, it sends additional probes to find the type of device or the operating system on the device. For example, Discovery sends the WMI probe to a Windows machine to detect the Windows 2012 operating system. Then Discovery uses records called classifiers, which specify the trigger probe or probes that run during the next two phases. If you are using patterns, the classifier specifies a trigger probe that in turn launches a pattern.

• Identification

  Discovery tries to gather more information about the device and then tries to determine if a CI for the device exists in the CMDB. Discovery then uses additional probes, sensors, and identifiers to update existing CIs in the CMDB or create new ones. Identifiers, also known as identification rules, specify the attributes that the probes look at when reconciling data with the CIs in the CMDB. If you are using patterns, Discovery uses the appropriate identification rule for the CI type specified in the pattern.

• Exploration

  The identifier launches additional probes configured in the classifier. These probes are especially designed as exploration probes to gather additional information about the device, like the applications running it, and additional attributes, such as memory, network cards, and drivers. Discovery then creates relationships between applications and devices and between applications. If you are using patterns, the operations in the pattern perform the exploration of the CI.

I suggest you to go with Horizontal discovery as you will be able to troubleshoot the issue base don the phases.

- Thank you.