What benefit is ServiceNow Discovery providing you?

[Brandon Warren]

What benefit is ServiceNow Discovery providing you? My company purchased discovery licensing with our initial contract about two years go and we've been unable to find any beneficial uses for it. We run a mostly virtualized environment and are able to pull in all of our Virtual Desktops\Servers via scheduled PowerShell jobs. All of our physical endpoints are in SCCM and are pulled in via SCCM\ServiceNow integration. We've tried to use discovery for some of our networking and power delivery equipment, but find that some of the information it pulls back about the devices is inaccurate. Even if it does pull back accurate information, it also pulls in a ton of CIs for information we have no intention of managing and doesn't give us an easy way to tune it back. We constantly hear about how amazing discovery is, but our experience with it hasn't been great and I was curious what others in the community though about it.

[knoxkf]

Hmm..  ok - Ill try.. and maybe it may be worthwhile to have a chat... 

We use ServiceNow discovery to discovery our server estate.  At one point we also had it disoverying network CI's but have moved to using another soruce of truth for those (but do have some sites using serivcenow discovery as the source of truth).  

So fundametnally

  - We have SCCM running and is the source of truth of truth for our desktop estate.  

  - Netbrain is source of truth for network devics

  - CiscoWireless/Ruckus is source of truth for cisco wireless devices

  - ServiceNow discovery is source of truth for servers/printers/cloud (AWS/AZURE)

  - netapp OCI for storage CI's

So what do we do with the data.  Discovery runs and discovers our estate once per week.  Support teams do not have to manually add the servers.  Servers appear in cmdb via discovery (and we set operational status to "discovered"). Discovered servers are managed by the SIAM team which do the proper on boarding.  Things like mapping business services, applications, owners support groups etc...  

Cloud discovery also brings in things like TAGS which enriches the data in the cmdb.  We use tags for "environments", up/down schedules.

Our event mgmt using the data in the CMDB - cloudwatch into event suppress incidents from being created when the server is in a scheduled down state.  We also suppress incidents for any alert that tries to point to a server that is NOT in our CMDB.  

So, for us several advantages we see and realize.  

Automated updates of data updates in the cmdb

We have audit trail showing what has changed in the CMDB via discovery

relationships to other CI's - so if an alert for a network ci is tied to a server we can coorelate the alerts properly and not have 50 incidents for a network outage as an example.

Hope this helps

[Rahul Priyadars]

Hi,

There must be a business use case for purchase of Discovery tool. 

There must be some Consumers of This Data like IM, CM, AM. 

 baseline our various  CI and Assets.

 find some dependency between Components like Cluster, DB, Servers,processes ESX , Processes, Middleware etc.

Server OS Patching Use case and reboot after patching  is driven from CMDB data. 

Blackout window Automation is driven from CMDB Data 

Monitoring Tool ALerts are binded with CMDB data so Incident is raised against the given CI,

Billing and metering dependency on Servers Metal Category also driven.

Some of the use cases i added here where Discovery is helping us in 90% attributes rest 10% we are doing manually or thru mass load.

Regards

RP

[Suggy]

@Rahul Priyadarshy 

You mentioned about patches. Can you please answer this.

Some light on this topic please 🙂

[Ashutosh Munot1]

HI,

Discovery is not only about discovering servers, network device, its beyond that. Also depends on maturity of organisation and its network components. Why i am saying this is because managing this CIs in single environment is a need for big organisation and we dont want 10 other tools to manage this devices at 10 different places and invest money in 10 other tools.

Indeed this is a big advantage that we have one environment i.e. servicenow from where you can have a look at the whole topology of the network CI its connection to application service if service mapping is used. Also we have done provisioning and decommissioning from servicenow which also uses discovery some or the other way.

Short benefits are:

1) One Environment for your CMDB.

2) No need to have multiple tools for managing this CIs

3) Accurate and latest CMDB

4) Good Connection with Monitoring tools like splunk, Solarwinds, for event management

5) ITSM process integrations with CMDB.

6) You can discovery Application layer like WebSphere, tomcat, MQ,etc via discovery which is not possible i think via SCCM.

7) Discovery discovers relationships which is highly important for ITSM processes for impact analysis.

@Alex Darby Any other thoughts on this?

Thanks,
Ashutosh