As an existing ServiceNow customer, after the initial discovery implementation is complete, you may ask yourself, “what other pieces of the discovery tool can I leverage?”
If you can access a system, run a command, and get an output, you can Discover it. If you need to track attributes of the technology in your environment, you should let Discovery find it for you. Not only can you use Discovery to find what’s in your environment, consider using it to find what should be in your environment as well. No wonder it can be hard to know where to start.
With years of experience and expertise around the ServiceNow platform, Cask and can help with the setup, implementation, and configuring of Discovery along with the other capabilities in the ITOM Suite. Our team will help unpack your requirements and guide you to effectively leverage the appropriate discovery capabilities while using ServiceNow’s best practices. With Cask, you can feel confident that you are properly leveraging the discovery capabilities to meet your specific business needs.
Our solution involves several key steps, including some not widely known capabilities, and how they can be leveraged in your organization to solve business problems.
Extend Discovery for your environment
While an out-of-the-box implementation will typically discovery 90% of common attributes of your infrastructure, you may need to pull in additional attributes or relationships. ServiceNow allows you to extend their discovery a patterns to capture more information about your technology as you need it.
Create custom Discovery Patterns
Your organization may have custom solutions or unique implementations of certain technologies. For those situations, the out-of-the-box patterns may not gather the information you need. Creating your own patterns will allow Discovery to find your infrastructure as you have it deployed in your environment.
Integrate Discovery with Change Management
Discovery is meant to keep your configuration items as up-to-date as possible. Since most configuration item updates occur as part of a change, you can have Discovery automatically trigger at specific phases of the change process, instead of waiting for your discovery schedules or having the change implementer trigger discovery on the configuration items one at a time.
Event-Based Discovery
Most Discovery occurs using schedules to interrogate your environment at regular intervals. However, cloud environments can send infrastructure changes in real-time, so that Discovery can update those configuration items as soon as they are changed. There are also Discovery APIs available. You can use these API calls within your CI/CD pipeline so that as releases are deployed Discovery can be executed on those system at that point in time automatically.
Consider Service Mapping
While Discovery can find your infrastructure components, their specific attributes, and connections, it does not know the purpose of those configuration items, only that they exist. Service Mapping helps to automate this. Service Mapping works to relate configuration items within the context of a Business Service or Application Service. This allows you to not only see the impact configuration items have on each other but also how the configuration item is impacting your business.
Discovery can pull in lots of information about your IT environments. However, the standard out-of-the-box implementation is just a starting point. With Discovery, you can automatically interrogate and inventory the technology landscape of your organization.
As your organization grows and more information needs to be captured, leveraging Discovery will keep that information up to date and decrease dependencies on spreadsheets or external repositories. This allows you to gain more insight into your IT environments, automate labor-intensive processes, and capture more data to help make better decisions.
