The journey to build a data platform for Enterprise IT begins with ServiceNow Discovery. ServiceNow native discovery technology is the industry's most commonly used solution to hydrate CMDB and create service context awareness for the infrastructure assets. Deploying the ServiceNow Discovery solution is relatively straightforward if you have credentials, IP ranges, and MID Servers in your data center with port access to target endpoints. However, the real challenge lies in continuously scanning the network and maintaining the discovery schedules by addressing credential and access issues.
With the August 2024 store release, we are introducing the "Discovery Admin Workspace," designed for Discovery Administrators to configure the discovery solution and handle day-to-day administration for continuous discovery. If your ServiceNow instance has the Washington Patch 5 or Xanadu family release, you will be able to explore new ways of working with the Discovery product.
The Discovery Admin Workspace is a brand-new identity that reflects our ambitious product vision to simplify discovery administration activities. It includes automated diagnostics for discovery errors, ML-powered clustering on discovery error logs, discovery case management, a tuning advisor, and many more features. Let me highlight the top key features of this new experience.
Discovery Home
The new Discovery Admin Workspace features a modern design that streamlines your workflow and enhances overall efficiency. The intuitive layout ensures all critical information needed for discovery administration is readily available, including key KPI trends on canceled discovery jobs, Discovery case tasks, and ECC queue trends. The ITOM Visibility Apps landing page will display all the discovery and visibility apps from store.servicenow.com related to your entitlement, and it will validate if you have any updates to install.
Quick Discovery
Quick Discovery for multiple IP address is fully supported with this new experience. You can initiate Quick Discovery from Discovery - Home for multiple IP address, and the results will be available in the Discovery Status and Discovery Log for further analysis and action.
Schedules
The new schedule overview page allows you to visualize all discovery schedules by location and gain insights into the total discovery attempts. The redesigned schedule form view consolidates historical discovery status into a unified view with advanced discovery error management. Trend lines on discovery errors and discovered devices, along with embedded Shazzam insights for each schedule, simplify the troubleshooting experience for discovery administrators.
Diagnostics - Log Analysis
Discovery errors are often overwhelming for admins. The newly designed Diagnostics error control pane provides ML-clustering on the discovery errors and helps discovery admin to troubleshoot discovery errors with advanced filtering options by schedules with attached knowledge base articles.
Case Management
To achieve successful Discovery, collaboration with cross-functional teams such as server administrators, the IPAM team, the security team, and the network firewall team is essential. Coordinating these teams via email threads for troubleshooting access-related issues can be challenging.
Introducing Discovery case management: this feature allows you to create discovery case tasks from ML-clustered discovery errors and assign them to the relevant cross-functional teams. Additionally, the Visual Task Board provides an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface to manage tasks and workflows. With Kanban-style boards, you can enable real-time collaboration, streamline task assignments, and simplify reporting, making it easier to quantify and manage discovery-related administrative tasks.
Shazzam Insights
Tracking all active/alive IP addresses in your network is a fundamental aspect of network security. It provides visibility, helps identify unauthorized devices, supports compliance efforts, and enhances the ability to detect and respond to threats. The Shazzam probe from ServiceNow Discovery plays a vital role in the initial discovery of network devices, using port scans to assist with device identification. With the new Shazzam Insights, you gain access to all active IP addresses, Alive IPs, DNS context, and tracking of active port connections at the time of the scan.
Content 360
ServiceNow ITOM Content Serviceoffers value-added services to your Discovery implementation, by enriching unclassified process fingerprints to normalized publisher and product taxonomy from the Software Asset management content library. ServiceNow performs clustering analysis on your discovered running process table and creates summarized records in cmdb_process_groups tables. Discovery Administrators can curate process fingerprints or OPT-IN to share un-classified summarized process fingerprints in the cmdb_process_groups table to ITOM Content services. You can also create installed software data from the discovered running process estate.Check out this blog to get an extended view of the new ITOM Content Services.
Tuning Advisor
Deploying the ServiceNow Discovery solution effectively requires careful planning and adherence to best practices to ensure accurate and efficient discovery of IT assets. The Tuning Advisor feature will analyze discovery / MID settings to determine where improvements can be made and then present you with improvement options. The health score analyzed by the advisor engine will enable the discovery admin to fine-tune configuration options.
Insights
Insights will have a single pane of glass view to get access to all dashboards with a single click experience. My favorites include "Shazzam Insights", "Virtual Machine Explorer" and "Kubernetes Explorer" dashboards.
Learning
Self-service learning is using the knowledge base resources available from support.servicenow.com, go-to market awareness campaign videos from the YouTube ITOM channel.
Try the Discovery Admin Workspace experience by downloading the store application fromstore.servicenow.com.
Be sure to try out the newest product innovations, and stay up to date on what is coming up through live webinars, Youtube videos, and blogs on ServiceNow Community.
