Service Mapping (Top Down) and Discovery (Horizontal) Products...Are they required to both be purchased to just use Service Mapping or can Service Mapping exist without having Discovery?

[TrenaFritsche]

We are on Kingston patch 6

We are trying to get to the bottom of what is actually "required" to own and exist in our environment to enable Service Mapping to work and map our business services.  We are going to be using our CMDB as a repository of data that has been already discovered from an external database which will be Hardware items that we want to track.  It does include Computers and may include Servers, and we are not sure that Discovery will benefit us any longer.  That is still being determined, but the ultimate question that has not really been answered is this:  To purchase Service Mapping as a Standalone product without having the purchased SN Discovery module, is this possible and are there just database fields in the CMDB that need to have certain values to enable Service Mapping to work or is there more to it?  We have CI's being used in our Incident and Change Modules and we have a lot of data in our CMDB, but now we are really more focused on getting the Top Down Mapping of applications/business services to be automated and using Service Mapping seems to be the route, but didn't want to have to have Discovery installed to have it work.  Can you give me more details on if this is possible?  If Discovery is required, can you please explain what is the requirement?

Thanks,

Trena

[Jeff Currier]

For licensing questions, you should always leverage your ServiceNow account team first as your organization may have special contract considerations which might be different from the standard licensing agreements.  You can  purchase Service Mapping separately.  Leveraging your existing CIs will be helpful.  Most of the work will be building out the maps to ensure the proper relationships.

-HTH

[TrenaFritsche]

Hi JeffCsn,

Thanks for your response to my question!  We are working with our Account Rep, but I am not asking from a business cost/licensing perspective, but from a purely technical requirement and if Service Mapping will technically work without having Discovery and it sounds from your response that Service Mapping Module works without having Discovery...am I understanding that?  I didn't know if the technical usage of Service Mapping would use something only provided with the Discovery module or if they are mutually exclusive.  If you know this, can you elaborate more on it?

Thanks,

Trena

[Jeff Currier · Accepted solution]

So I think the answer to your question is no, as Service Mapping uses Discovery.  So with Service Mapping you are doing vertical discovery to map the business service.  It will use Discovery to do that.  But it isn't doing horizontal discovery and you wouldn't need to license for horizontal discovery.  So with Service Mapping, you will be discovering nodes and creating CIs for them.  It will use discovery for that but it is only traversing the business service.  That is the difference.  Does that make sense?

-Jeff

[TrenaFritsche]

Thanks.  So it sounds like if we buy the Service Mapping product, it comes with a discovery engine that does a vertical discovery and if we buy the Discovery Product individually, it would come with a discovery engine that does a horizontal discovery.  Is that how they work if we didn't license the horizontal discovery?  Both applications would come with a discovery engine and only the vertical or horizontal would work depending on the one that is licensed for.  Is this correct?  Thanks so much for your assistance!