Servicenow Discovery - Multicloud

[ChaitanyaG26248]

Team,
We have a multi cloud environment. (AWS / Azure & GCP) & we want to perform discovery across all clouds.
As per the environment, cloud team is saying that they can provide connectivity from AWS to Azure & GCP.
It is a best practice? Can we Perform this type of Discovery?

[shubhamseth]

@ChaitanyaG26248 

Yes, technically this type of setup can work, but from an enterprise architecture and ServiceNow best practice perspective, it is usually NOT the recommended approach for large-scale multi-cloud discovery.

Recommended Best Practice

For multi-cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP), the preferred approach is:

• Deploy MID Servers close to each cloud environment
• Keep discovery traffic local to that cloud/network
• Use cloud-native APIs wherever possible
• Avoid routing all discovery traffic through one cloud unnecessarily

Example:

• AWS MID → AWS resources
• Azure MID → Azure resources
• GCP MID → GCP resources

This provides:

• Better scalability
• Lower latency
• Better security segmentation
• Reduced firewall complexity
• Improved troubleshooting
• Better resiliency

Can Discovery Work Across Clouds?

Yes, if:

• Proper routing exists
• Firewall ports are open
• DNS resolution works
• SSH/WMI/SNMP/API access is allowed
• Latency is acceptable

Then a MID Server hosted in AWS can technically discover Azure/GCP resources.

Important Considerations

1. Network Latency

Cross-cloud discovery may increase:

• SSH/WMI timeout issues
• Slower pattern execution
• ECC queue delays

2. Security Concerns

Security teams may not prefer:

• East-west cloud connectivity
• Broad firewall openings between clouds

3. Scalability

One centralized MID handling all clouds may become:

• overloaded
• harder to troubleshoot
• a bottleneck

4. Cloud Discovery vs Traditional Discovery

For cloud resources, prefer:

• AWS Cloud Discovery
• Azure Cloud Discovery
• GCP Cloud Discovery

using cloud APIs instead of only traditional IP-based discovery.

This is more reliable and cloud-native.

Recommended Enterprise Architecture

Most enterprise customers use:

• Separate MID clusters per cloud/region
• Dedicated cloud service accounts
• API-based cloud discovery
• Local network discovery within each cloud

rather than routing all discovery traffic from one cloud to another.

Final Recommendation

• Possible? → Yes
• Supported? → Yes
• Recommended for enterprise scale? → Usually No

Best practice is distributed MID architecture aligned with each cloud environment.