How does discovery find the asset tag on a Windows computer?

[frankkuligowski]

How does discovery find the asset tag on a Windows computer?   Is there anything special that I need to add over out-of-box functionality?   Where is the Probe, Sensor, or other code that gets this data from the computer and populates the CMDB (so I can see how Svc Now accomplishes this)?

[doug_schulze · Accepted solution]

Frank,

We do not collect asset tag in discovery. Unless someone puts it in the OS Somewhere its normally a physical tag on the outside of a machine.   To see what is collected out of box you can read up on that here Data Collected by Discovery - ServiceNow Wiki

All your probes and sensors are kept in the discovery definition application and are triggered as part of a met classification (classifiers) as to how it all works well thats much more difficult to put in a community post but here are some references

5-part series on Troubleshooting a failed Discovery

Book:Discovery - ServiceNow Wiki  

And a few examples that our community here contributes from time to time..

https://community.servicenow.com/search.jspa?q=custom%20probe/sensor

Bottom line is if the system has the answer to a question you can ask over a remote query you can add that probe and sensor to populate the custom attribute!

-Doug

PS> if You haven't gone through discovery training or are new to the product I highly recommend our training class Configuration Item Identification, Implement ServiceNow Discovery | ServiceNow Training   and thats not just because I contribute to its development .. heh Or our PS team or many of our partners can help get you going in an even faster timeframe if you are in a crunch and for that contact your Account Manager for arrangements!

[Brian Dailey1]

Hi Frank,

On the computer's side, you would need to have entered the asset tag somewhere such as in the BIOS or a registry key.   After that, like Doug says, you can get to pretty much anything that is on the computer using a probe.

There were some labs on writing probes for discovery at the Knowledge conference which were pretty good, but I don't know whether you can access them if you did not attend.

-Brian

[frankkuligowski]

Thank you both Doug and Brian for the great information, and for the quick reply.

I could have sworn that at a previous engagement we were capturing the Asset Tag from the Windows system BIOS, as described at the link below.

PowerShell One-Liner: Getting This Computer's Asset Tag Number - Lessons Learned - Site Home - MSDN ...

But, I sure couldn't find any Probes or Sensors, or anything related that was picking up this WMI setting or that was setting the asset_tag field.

So, I guess my memory has failed me in this case.

Thanks again for your help,

Frank K