Updating CI attributes with Discovery

[jesusemelendezm]

Hi SN folks,

What information is updated when you run discovery against an existing CI. Given the scenario, I have two CIs and I manually update the location and status of these two CIs. Once the discovery runs against these two CIs. Will the discovery change the location and status that I manually input in the record? How about the field class? what If I update it manually... will discovery re-classify this CI?

I have done- some testing and I know the result, I want to confirm if what I am getting is the the proper output or/and how to change these parameters.

Thanks,

Jesus E.

[Sharon Hobart · Accepted solution]

The status of the CI's are not affected or updated by Discovery except on initial creation.   After that the status field is maintained by process.

For location, it will remain blank and discovery will not overlay any manual information with a "blank".   But if you have a discovery schedule created and you have populated the location field on the discovery schedule itself, then that location will be applied to that CI and will overlay any other information that was manually populated in that field.

If you change the class of a CI from Windows Server to Server as an example, on the next discovery run it will create a new CI back under the Windows Server class. So you will have two - one under Windows Server class and one under the Server class.     Of course, this is based on the "matching rules" in place for CI's.   But I believe we are using what is out-of-the-box.

We are going to test a matching criteria rule that is "false" out of the box to match only a serial number without class being part of that decision.

[jesusemelendezm]

So "Name" is not an unique index for the CI table out-of-the-box??

[cyked]

No, serial number is typically your unique Identifier as rule 1.  In your instance, go to CI Identifiers under Identification/Reconciliation. Look for the "Hardware Rule" rule, you can in the related list Identifiers Entries tab the rules that apply to Hardware and in what order.  Name is one of the ordered rules, and may be active out of the box.  So if its the 5th rule by order, if the other rules "fail" and a match is made by name then that CI would be updated.  

Hope that helps.

[Ankush13]

It should not update location and status that you have manually entered, unless you are specifying location each time you run the discovery. By status if you mean discovery status, then that is controlled by discovery run and will be changed. What do you see?