What solution are you using for CI discovery and import?

[Robin Chytil]

We integrated with various tools to discover, filter and import various CI and related attributes. We have connections with:

• AD for PC discovery,
• SCCM for PC attributes
• NNMi (network) via uCMDB for network
• uCMDB for servers (OS instances), DBs and printers
• SCCM for software installations

uCMDB stands for Universal CMDB from HP. It is an application developed by Mercury, very powerful, very complex and not very stable ("the HP way"), and we use it only for discovery. Services and most dependencies are created in ServiceNow.

What tool(s) are you using? We are looking for a "good enough" solution.

Is ServiceNow discovery capability sufficient?

Any pointer or advice?

Thanks

[Ashish Nahar]

ServiceNow Discovery capability is definitely good enough to discover almost everything out of your network. But the only problem i see is with relationship and classification. What comes with ServiceNow is not enough, so you have keep drilling down and customize what you need in terms of results from discovery or mapping CI's.

[dariusz_szybows]

The agent-less ServiceNow Discovery solution can potentially discover most (if not all) elements connected to your network and having the IP address. It's using the 3 protocols: SNMP, SSH and WMI (for Windows based machine). In some   situations the discovery via WMI imposes the security constrains (necessary privileges) which are not accepted by the Network Security people.    

For that reason the most of the customers are using   mix of two tools: SCCM for the Windows machine and the ServiceNow Discovery for all others.

The SNC Discovery uses MID Server to access the customer internal elements and it's based on the pairs Probe/Sensor which query the elements and parse the responses. The additional pairs can be added to adapt for the specific contexts.