Discovery - Questions

ryan86
Kilo Expert

‎06-12-2014 06:43 AM

Hi all,

 

I'm relatively new to ServiceNow (1 month, and recently attended the Admin course).

 

I have inherited a ServiceNow Instance where the Business Services Map is incomplete. It was my understanding, that the discovery process should populate the CMDB, in turn producing the relevant Business Service Maps as required.

 

For instance - the BSM should show that the Business Service "Email", is reliant upon the Server "OurEServer", which is reliant upon a switch "OurSwitch". However, our "Email" business Service has no relationships whatsoever, it has nothing up or downstream.

 

1) Why is this?

2) Can I "Re-Run" discovery again to populate as required without messign the instance up?

3) I do not want to manually set up relationships, I want discovery to do it. Can anyone advise how?

 

Thanks in advance  

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Mark Stanger
Giga Sage

‎06-12-2014 07:33 AM

Business services are logical (non-discoverable) CIs so there's no way to completely automate their discovery.   Generally, discovery will automatically discover everything (including relationships) directly below the business service layer, but the services and relationships to lower-level CI infrastructure need to be created and maintained manually.



ServiceNow does have some capability to automate some of this by placing an application profile XML file in the discovered environment that tells discovery which service to map to.   The creation and placement of these files still needs to be done independent of the actual discovery in order to work.   In practice, I haven't seen this used much but you can learn how it's done here...



Application Profile Discovery - ServiceNow Wiki



Please mark this as the solution to your question if I've answered your question.


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ryan86
Kilo Expert
In response to Mark Stanger

‎06-12-2014 07:45 AM

Hi Mark,



Thanks for the info. So, in reality, discovery should be able discover and record the relationships between hardware, it will then be my responsibility to add the Business services and configure there relationships?



I am looking to achieve something similar to the below (taken from the ServiceNow Admin Book)



DSC_0146.JPG



I want/need discovery to find EVERYTHING downstream of the Business Service "Email". Can it do this?



Thanks again,


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Mark Stanger
Giga Sage
In response to ryan86

‎06-12-2014 07:50 AM

Yes, it can...and it does a very good job of discovering the hardware, but also the applications, software, and databases running on the hardware.   In the case of business services, discovery will tell you the servers and applications running on them that make up that service.   With the link above, you can automate the linkage to a pre-defined business service but I've found that it usually isn't worth all that effort to get that done so the link to business services is typically done manually.


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edward_williams
Tera Contributor
In response to Mark Stanger

‎08-18-2014 08:49 AM

Hi Guys,



So here's the real question...once I use ServiceNow Discovery to discover all of my hardware and software in my environment and ServiceNow discovers all of that hardware and software and how it is related to each other (relationships and dependencies) then I logically link the Business Service to what ServiceNow has discovered...



How do I know that what was discovered by ServiceNow that is linked to that Business Service are the only downstream items that impact that Business Service?



ServiceNow discovery may find 200 web servers for example but that Business Service only uses 2 of them. Which 2 of the 200 web servers found should be the only web servers linked to the Business Service?


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