Laptop and desktop discovery in service now discovery

[SNN1]

Hi All,

We are implementing discovery in our instance, Need some information in desktop and laptop discovery.

As I understood, We need to provide A domain user with local administrator access on the target Windows hosts in credentials table which discovery will discover Windows servers and will populate in CMDB.

So in order to discover desktop and laptops what credentials need to be configured and to which table will these be updated.

And should these in client environment to discover, please suggest what is the best practice to update laptop and desktops.

any help will be highly appreciated.

Thanks & Regards,

SNN

[nisma]

Hello SNN,

The user configured in the credentials must have local admin access to the Windows machine. The credential that you configure must have the following:

• Access to the WMI service to the current namespace and sub-namespaces.
• Access to the Powershell service.
• Membership in the Distributed COM Users local security group.

The main table that will be populated is "cmdb_ci_win_server" but other tables will be populated as well like "cmdb_ci_network_adapter" with the network adapter data and "cmdb_ci_disk" for disk related data. Kindly refer to our documentation below for more information:

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

Thanks,

Nisma

[robertgeen]

SNN,

What is the purpose of discovering these laptops and desktops? I only ask because in order for discovery to be able to discover them they are going to have to be online and connected to the network and that can be very difficult to get a KPI around your total hit rate. If the desktops are being managed by some configuration management software (such as SCCM) then it may be better to integrate with them and pull the data in. I suspect you are doing this for inventory purposes so that's the approach I would recommend (really the main reason for using discovery over integrating would be if you need dependency maps built which doesn't make a lot sense for laptops and desktops). Hope this helps.

[SNN1]

Thank you for quick response..

If SCCM is updating desktops and laptops , and we configure service account for windows related devices does this pull desktop and laptops and create a duplicates in CMDB..

Thanks & Regards,

SNN

[robertgeen]

That all depends on what data is coming back but it shouldn't if it's all going through the identification engine. The only thing you will want to do is make sure that 1 of those is the source for installed software so you don't have consistency issues with the name of installed software (generally people use SCCM as the source of truth for that). Either way I definitely recommend using the SCCM integration to get Laptop/Desktop CIs and if you don't want it to grab servers then it's just a matter of changing the import set code. Hope this helps.