What is the difference between Discovery and Service Mapping? - Article

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Service Mapping discovers all application services in your organization and builds a comprehensive map of all devices, applications, and configuration profiles used in these application services.

What is the need of Service Mapping when there is Discovery?

What is Discovery?

Discovery is a ServiceNow capability used to identify and map individual IT assets (Configuration Items or CIs) within your IT environment. These assets may include:

• Servers
• Network devices
• Databases
• Applications
• Cloud resources

Discovery helps populate the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) with technical details such as:

"This is a Windows Server running MS SQL, with IP 10.10.10.5 and hostname KYEXSQL02P."

While Discovery provides detailed insight into what components exist and their configurations, it does not explain how these components interact or function together to deliver a complete business service.

What is Service Mapping?

Service Mapping builds upon Discovery. It maps out end-to-end business services by showing how various CIs are interconnected to support a business capability.

Service Mapping helps answer key questions like:

• “What infrastructure supports the payroll application?”
• “If this database goes down, which business services will be impacted?”

Service Mapping creates a top-down view of service delivery, which is essential for incident impact analysis, change management, and business continuity.

Example to Illustrate the Difference

Online Banking Application

Imagine your organization runs an Online Banking Platform that customers use to:

• View account balances
• Transfer funds
• Pay bills

Infrastructure Behind the Scenes:

• Web Server – Hosts the user interface
• Application Server – Executes business logic
• Database Server – Stores customer and transaction data
• Authentication Server – Handles login and security
• Load Balancer – Distributes traffic among servers

What Discovery Does:

Discovery finds and records these components individually into the CMDB:

• WebServer01 (Linux, Apache)
• AppServer01 (Tomcat)
• DBServer01 (PostgreSQL)
• AuthServer01 (Windows, Active Directory)
• LoadBalancer01 (F5)

Limitation: Discovery knows these CIs exist and what they are, but not how they function together.

What Service Mapping Does:

Service Mapping takes these discovered components and shows their functional relationships:

Online Banking Service

├── LoadBalancer01  

  └── WebServer01     

   └── AppServer01           

               ├── DBServer01            

                └── AuthServer01 

Now, if DBServer01 has a performance issue:

• The Online Banking Service is flagged as impacted
• You immediately understand potential business impact (e.g., users can't transfer funds)

Service Mapping deploys different methods for collecting information about configuration items (CIs) and organizing them into application services. The available mapping methods are: pattern-based, tag-based, traffic-based, and discovery based on Predictive Intelligence. Learn about the mapping methods to use the ones that best suit the needs of your organization.