Should the PeopleSoft discovery patterns work out of box?

[James Behrens]

We are currently implementing ServiceNow Discovery and Service Mapping. One of the application services we have chosen to start with is PeopleSoft. The patterns are extensive and, for the most part, seem to function well. They certainly provide a fair amount of information, once you get past some areas that hard fail.

I thought it was interesting that the discovery would hard fail, proceed no further, if the pattern could not determine the version of PeopleSoft or Tuxedo. It does nothing with either of those, other than to populate the CMDB. It's not required for any of the following discovery or service mapping steps.

For the moment, in subprod, we have simply put one more step in ServiceNow's published pattern to set the version to 'unknown' if it cannot resolve the version in any of the previous steps. Once you do that, discovery completes without errors. Warnings, but no errors so no hard stop.

Through all of the training, it is reinforced over and over not to modify the pattern logic, only add extensions. I am going to open a HI ticket to report all the areas where I needed to modify and ask for modifications to the patterns. Using the version example above, the pattern should simply not populate the variable if it is not needed for a follow on step, right? Give me a warning and the ability to create an extension to get the data another way if necessary.

Does that sound right? 

[James Behrens]

Ugh, sorry.. it said it was failing on the post of this question. I have three instances of it now. 

[Mongkoll]

Yes, that approach makes sense. Handling version gaps gracefully helps avoid unnecessary failures. We’ve run into similar issues during PeopleSoft integrations and found that tools like Peopletools att can offer useful insights or workarounds, especially when dealing with rigid pattern logic in ServiceNow.

[James Behrens]

Thanks so much for the response. I'll ask our PeopleSoft team about ATT, this is the first I have heard of it. Can you give me an example of how it assisted with service mapping?