How to avoid creation of CI's when Discovery runs

[mechamberlain]

We're trying to get discovery at my company to NOT create Computer CI's, even if there is matchable data discovered and no CI matches in the CMDB.   The result would be that Discovery only updates existing matched CIs and does not create new CI's.

Is there a way to make this happen?   I'm thinking a change to one of the out-of-the-box Discovery Identification scripts might do it (see below), but I'm stuck.

Has anyone tackled this?   Thanks in advance for your time and attention.

[crc2580]

Just out of curiosity, what's the business need to not create CI's with Discovery?

[mechamberlain]

Chase,

Our operational processes attempt to insure that hardware assets (and therefore their corresponding CI's) are already created in ServiceNow before CI's of certain classes show up on our network.   So any device in these classes that are Discovered that do not have a corresponding asset record already created either fell through the operational cracks or are not actually our "official" assets.

So the thinking was to insure that CI's don't get created by Discovery.

After thinking about it a bit more over the weekend, I may recommend we actually go another route that eliminates the need for this "customization" and just use standard functionality already in ServiceNow:

We may just setup the Model Category for these classes as "Requires CI verification".   This will allow the creation of CI's by Discovery but will prevent the automatic creation of corresponding hardware assets if none exists.     Since the "Requires verification" attribute on CI's will allow is to report on any CI's that fall into this category, it also enables the standard ways of dealing with CI verification.   So, win/win, I hope.   We'll see!

Thanks for asking.

Marty

crc2580   Tagging Chase Clinton

[crc2580]

I suspected something along those lines (op process). Another option to consider would be adding an additional status "Discovered" and set that as the status for these CI's as they get created. Makes it easy to report out and work out ownership with the responsible party.

Good luck!