Hi Paul -- lots of good questions! To clarify, Discovery and Service Mapping (SM) are complimentary ITOM products that work together. It's inaccurate to look at this as a "migration" because both products co-exist (both need to be present). Its good that your Discovery environment is mature because that is a HIGHLY important pre-req. A company should have a well-functioning Disco environment before considering Service Mapping too.
Regarding your questions:
1. Customized probes/sensors should not have any ill-affect on SM. No real concerns... These probes/sensors will still be leveraged for hardware/infrastructure components, even as you implement SM. Discovery is still needed to make SM do its thing, so existing Disco components continue to be needed. Including such things as MID servers and Credentials, defined when you built out Disco --- these are also used by SM.
2. I don't fully understand your 'differentiate' question. But perhaps you are asking whats the difference between Disco & SM? If so, Disco is considered "horizontal" discovery, which I think of as more/less and INVENTORY of hardware & software... Disco is more than that, but a useful way to think of it. Meanwhile, SM is considered "tops-down" or "vertical" discovery, of Services. SM, instead of doing an inventory of stuff, is mapping out the key ingredients (i.e. technical components & their primary connections) to provide some service.
Example: Think of an airline reservation URL (as an entry point into a Service). This reservation website has many important tech components that when all combined provide reservation service. [think: Load balancers -> Web servers -> Database servers -> etc]. While Disco provides the inventory of machines, etc... SM provides the business perspective of "WHY" these things exist in the first place, and explicitly WHAT-CONNECTS-TO-WHAT to deliver a specific service
3. For the Discovery portion, you still use probes & sensors -- i.e. "the inventory" concept. Disco and all its components do not go away when you implement SM. SM leverages the data collected by Disco then SM requires PATTERNS to collect Application-level info and also to 'connect-the-components' to define the Service Map. SM leans heavily on PATTERNS and you will want to learn how to build Patterns to 'vertically discover' Services. Meanwhile, Probes/Sensor keep providing value to the Discovery (inventory) portion of this complex puzzle.
FYI: Service Mapping basics video Understanding Service Mapping docs
Below, are additional clarification provided by Disco guru extraordinaire Doug Schulze:
Service mapping: Will utilize Hz discovery (probes/sensors) information of the server (hardware) including the running processes it found from the LAST discovery. When it identifies a process (say apache) that is part of the map it will trigger a pattern to analyze the application and all its goodies then derive where it goes next be it from TCP connections (hz disco info) or config file instructions (SM pattern). If a expected host is not found in a map step SM will trigger a Hz discovery to get that host in the CMDB so it can be analyzed. So your in two phases here, Hz discover doing its thing then Service mapping using the application pattern to do its analysis.
Horizontal Discovery (Hz): will use probes/sensors to do the hardware discovery then go through the “normal” application mapping that you are used to. In the process classifiers the probes and sensors will be used unless they are on a version where patterns have replaced the oob probes/sensors which was done in phases over the last couple releases.
Any new/zboot customers on London and beyond are all patterns! Probes and sensors are depreciated but can and are available to be used, just no more development on that front. Existing customers probes and sensors will not get replaced unless they do so on their own.. but shouldn’t until they fix a major bug with the hardware discovery. Patterns for applications and network gear are safe to goto whenevery they (existing customers) want to.. just no on the computers…
Does this help? Hope so!
