Discovery runing in Production is advisable

ravishankerayya · ‎07-31-2017

Hi All

Can somebody tell us some info or best practises running Discovery in the production.

How do we handle the duplicate CI data populated by discovery and slowing the production system and the data quality.

Is it okay to run in stage rather in production what are your thoughts?

Please share your thoughts

thanks

Ravi

camran · ‎08-01-2017

There are a couple of best practices here.

Rule of thumb is ...* Never run Discovery on Prod infrastructure from your prod instance at the start.

To manage the duplicate data, you have to normalize and create a business rule to assess existing database 1) Initially class by class. 2) Once mature create the task for each new case.

1- Initially run the discovery from Dev instance to Production infrastructure. Once your CMDB is stable, directly run it from Prod instance to Prod infrastructure.

2- Define and Enforce Configuration policy, that is going to be the track for your discovery.

Policy example: What actions are required for new discovered CIs ? or Updated CIs.

Best practices are after a certain level of maturity, discovered CIs should be through Change management.

Regards

Camran

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Chuck Tomasi · ‎07-31-2017

Hi Ravi,

First, yes - run it in production or you won't have production data available. Migrating Discovery data from every table is going to be more of a tax on the system than doing the discovery on prod. By default, Discovery won't be a burden on your system.

CI updates (or inserts) are handled by you. YOU set up the rules whether you want to resolve by serial number, class, hostname, MAC address, IP address, or some combination of attributes for the CI.

http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Setting_Up_Discovery

bharath10 · ‎12-27-2018

Hello Chuck,

Wiki Link is redirecting to Product Documentation page.....

is it correct ??? is wiki servicenow portal down ?

R's,

Bharat

Dave Smith1 · ‎07-31-2017

Many of these enquiries are actually discussed and addressed on our Discovery course: https://www.servicenow.com/services/training-and-certification/discovery.html

danpatino · ‎07-31-2017

Hi Ravi,

Are you referring to running Discovery on your production ServiceNow environment or a production network?

If you are referring to your production ServiceNow environment, you should not run it for the first time in Prod. Run it a few times in dev and use the CMDB Dashboard and CI Class Manager >> CI Identifiers to identify and correct duplicates and their rules. Here is a link for your reference Create or edit a CI identification rule. However, I would suggest engaging Professional Services or a partner if you are planning on modifying the OOTB Discovery configuration.

For the latter, you would typically only run discovery on the IP ranges that you care about as Chuck suggested. I wouldn't worry about the performance impact either on your network or your ServiceNow instance as long are you are placing your MID servers in the data centers you are scanning.

Hope this helps.