ServiceNow ServiceWatch Overview Part 1

[paulblair]

ServiceNow ServiceWatch Overview

Paul Blair

Summary

ServiceWatch provides a top-down discovery methodology that uncovers supporting infrastructure for a given Business Service. This differs from traditional Discovery which uses a bottom-up methodology to discover multiple network devices across IP ranges.

Benefits

The real benefit of a service specific discovery include the ability to quickly see and corelate incidents, problems, and changes to a business service.   This includes its Configuration Items and their relationships.   The impact of having this information streamlines troubleshooting, reporting, and reduces change risk for the entire business.   Ultimately this information leads to greater up-times, higher customer satisfaction and increased revenue capability.

Technology 411

There are two primary discovery techniques available in ServiceWatch: (1) discovery from a single entry point, and (2) discovery using an IP range or subnet.     However, the primary method of discovery with ServiceNow begins with the top-down entry point. This method returns granular data from your infrastructure services including service specific relationships. ServiceWatch intelligent collectors run top-down retrieving only the data you defined as relevant.  

Note: To run discovery against your entire network - select a device as your entry point and begin your discovery.  

Other advantages of ServiceWatch top-down discovery model includes:

After the entry point and credentials for accessing the supporting devices have been defined, you initiate the discovery. There is no need to have a SME running these discoveries or rerunning existing mappings. This also means you can run discoveries across multiple technologies without needing a stakeholder from each system on hand.

The top-down discovery is agentless and very non-intrusive to your network meaning you don't have to install a config file or .exe file on each device to pull the information.   This limits the network saturation during the discovery.

ServiceWatch performs a full discovery and can locate network devices including Servers, PC, Printers, and PDUs. The discovery finds more than just physical CI's, it also locates the services running on the device. After discovery has completed, all information including any mapped relationships are presented graphically. The map that you view shows your relationships in a top down topology making it very easy to see what was discovered and in what order. You see the entry point at the top of the map identified by a blue arrow and down below, is a list of everything it discovered in a descending order.