Eliminate Blind Spots in Your IT Infrastructure | Discovery
By: Joseph T. 

What is Discovery?

ServiceNow Discovery lives within IT Operation Management (ITOM) and can automatically identify devices, applications and services running across your organization’s infrastructure and is populated into the Configuration Management Database (CMDB). Instead of relying on manual data entry or spreadsheets, Discovery can scan environments using credentials and APIs to gather accurate and real-time information about what is actually connected to the network.

Discovery starts by scanning defined IP ranges and cloud accounts, connecting to system and gathering details such as the OS, installed software, running services, and network relationships. The CMDB is then updated with standardized and normalized records with the patterns and identifications rules created to classify the findings.

Three foundational questions are answered for IT teams when using Discovery:

• What do we have?
• Where is it located?
• How is it connected?

The Problem: Why Blind Spots Persist

Even though such a powerful tool like Discovery exists, this does not mean your CMDB will be perfect. Many organizations still rely on manual processes or disconnected tools to track their assets. Tools like spreadsheets, periodic audits, or agent-based tools will more than likely fail to keep up with more modern environments. Due to this, the CMDB will become stale or incomplete, which causes teams to lose trust in the data entirely.

Common causes can include:

• Rapid Change
• Limited Ownership
• Manual Updates

When organizations start losing confidence in the data in the CMDB downstream process, they start to suffer. This can lead to incident teams not knowing which systems are affected, security teams can miss unmanaged endpoints and change teams may take unnecessary risks due to incomplete dependency information.

How ServiceNow Discovery Solves the Visibility Gap

Since ServiceNow Discovery uses an automated way to identify, classify and map infrastructure components rather than manual data entry, the CMDB gets populated with more accurate, normalized data. One of its strongest advantages is that Discovery can also operate consistently across hybrid environments. Many organizations run a mix of on-prem and cloud systems that provide unique challenges, but Discovery provides a unified approach. When there is an on-prem infrastructure, ServiceNow can scan servers and network devices to identify the operating systems, software, and hardware details. In contrast, Cloud System Discovery will connect using provided APIs to discover cloud resources like virtual machines, storage services, and databases. By consolidating all of this into one CMDB, IT teams get a unified view of the environment which is especially valuable for a team transitioning workloads to the cloud while maintaining legacy systems.

With this more accurate data, teams can operate more efficiently and accurately. Incident and problem teams will be able to understand which systems are impacted and who owns then when issues arise. This leads to faster and more accurate resolution times. Discovery also helps Change teams have a more complete view of application and infrastructure relationships so that they can accurately avoid unintended outages and avoid unnecessary risks.