Discovery without MID Server

[Fares K]

Hey team,

I was talking to my manager and we talked about the role of the MID Server.
He said that technically, for cloud environments, if there are API's that can fetch info for us, we wouldn't need a MID Server.

I disagreed, saying that the MID Server can parse the data instead of the instance, improving performance and the multi-tasking helps a lot.

Is he correct though? Should the MID Server be mandatory even for cloud environments? 

Thanks in advance,

Fares. 

[Arvind Singh Ra]

Hi Fares,

As far as I am concerned, there can't be a Discovery without a Mid Server. One of the main requirement to perform discovery is to have MID server installed in your system.

For more Info: 

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/newyork-it-operations-management/page/product/discovery/reference...

Cloud Discovery provides a wizard that allows you to create and run cloud schedules in a single interface. When you create a schedule with the Discovery Manager, you select the accounts to discover, the credentials for accessing these accounts, and the MID Servers to scan the resources. You can then view the results in the Discovery Home page and track any errors that might have occurred.

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/newyork-it-operations-management/page/product/discovery/concept/c...

Mark ✅ Correct and 👍 Helpful based on the impact.

Warm Regards,

Arvind

[DaveHertel · Accepted solution]

Hi -- The MID server is needed if you want the full 'picture' of the server/infrastructure in the cloud.   The Cloud discover uses APIs to get the cloud meta data (vpcs, definitions, images, cloud-related info...) but to get the running details running on a machine, like running processes, installed software on a VM (such as a EC2 server running on AWS) a MID server is needed to do traditional IP discovery.

With a MID, the traditional IP discovery to get the details of running machines can't be achieved.  The API's of cloud discovery won't provide things like running processes, installed software, machine config details (that are revealed when a machine is scanned via traditional IP discovery).

Hope that helps?

[Mark Jaroski]

Hi Dave,

Sorry to say, but this isn't compatible with our cloud-only strategy. It makes no sense to me that a cloud-based service should create a dependency on the data centre that I'm tasked with eliminating.

For cloud services like SharePoint Online or similar you really need to be able to go directly. If ServiceNow can't do this I might start to push my organization toward another solution.

Best,

Mark

[Ansh Mahajan]

What if I don't want to get into the details I just want to want the basic information about the devices like IP address and name etc. Is it possible without a MID server?. what is the role of MID server in cloud based discovery?