[Music] please subscribe to my channel and click on the bell icon to get the regular updates of my channel and do not forget to like comment and share hello everyone welcome to sas word service now this is a new training for discovery in servicenow in this training you will learn about discovery and how it is implemented in servicenow this training targets servicenow administrators servicenow developers servicenow product owners and servicenow implementers who want to implement discovery application for their client and customers in this course we will cover the topics like overview of servicenow discovery mid servers and their installation discovery applications and modules in servicenow we will learn about credentials and behaviors in servicenow probes sensors and patterns in discovery in servicenow phases of discovery discovery configuration and setup and last not the least troubleshooting we will learn about that while implementing discovery for your different customers and clients what kind of issues you can get and how you can fix those issues by the end of this training you will have a good understanding of discovery and you will be able to implement discovery application in servicenow for your customers and clients before you watch this training you should have experience of administration and service now you should have basic knowledge of networking like network protocols network devices and ip networking if you want to extend the functionality of discovery application then you should have development and scripting experience as well in service now the first section of this course is overview of discovery in this section we will learn what is discovery in service now why we need discovery in service now architecture of discovery components of discovery types of discovery and then phases of discovery so starting with what is servicenow discovery discovery is a product an application in servicenow which finds computers servers and network-enabled devices like routers once devices and their information are found then discovery updates those information in cmdb after performing validations it also updates information of hardware and software data and dependencies related to the device discovered one of the key feature of discovery is it is agent-less which means no agents have to be installed in destination systems or systems which need to be discovered let's understand discovery with example i'm going to use an example of dummy company sas now to explain different topics in this session let's say there is an organization called sas now now this company should have laptops desktops servers database and network routers in the infrastructure of the sas now company now the company intranet should have access to all of these devices and this company has implemented service now and now they want to store all of their devices the information of all of these devices in cmdb but how servicenow will store that data as it does not have access to those devices and it does not know how to find information of these devices so then discovery comes into the picture once you have implemented discovery it will start searching those devices with the help of mid server and configurations it will start search and find all database instances of that company and send those information back to servicenow and update them in cmdb then it will try to find network and try to find router and then update information about those routers in cmdb that is in service now and then it will search for all the laptops and update those information again in cmdb end service now similar to laptop it will try to search for desktops as well and then update those information in servicenow cmdb and then it will search for servers and update those information in servicenow cmdb similarly discovery can find different other types of devices or configuration items and update them in servicenow cmdb overall discovery helps to find different types of items connected to the organization which can be computer server database web server etc next topic for this section is why we need discovery it's very important to know why actually we need discovery in service now if you will know the benefit then you will be able to convince your organization your customers your clients to implement discovery in service now why we need discovery if i have to answer this question in one statement then my answer would be if your organization wants to update cmdb properly and make sure all the devices information are stored in cmdb automatically then discovery is used let's understand with an example there is a company sas now which has cmdb in service now and it also has list list of devices like different laptops routers servers now if you want to store details of these devices then there are some ways which can be used to populate the data in cmdb like excel in which teams can import data manually in service now via excel import another one is import that is wire transform map in which we can use different data sources and with the help of transformation you can update cmdb or you can create those rackets in cmdb and the last one is api in which another internal system of sas now company can collect data from different sources into one system and then send that data back to service now in to update cmdb tables and that will be done via api now all these imports are kind of a manual and needs timely maintenance which might need more money and resources now if i keep discovery in the picture then no manual imports or managing third-party integrations needed as discovery will do all of these jobs itself and find these devices of your organization automatically to update them in cmdb now the question is how exactly it gets access that how servicenow gets access to the devices of the organization how discovery gets access to the devices of the organization now this is something we will learn a little bit later now what happens when you don't use discovery so when you don't use discovery cmdb data quality might be compromised if you are importing via manual imports or apis however discovery will update the exact information of the devices in cmdb when you don't use discovery then you will be dependent on multiple sources to update the data in cmdb however cmdb will be the only source which will help you to update the data in cmdb tables when you don't use discovery then you might face failures or errors while importing data in manual import and other imports however once discovery is set up there is least possibility of failures unless you perform any changes in the functionality of the discovery the next topic for this section is architecture of discovery so if you have to work on discovery or implement discovery it's really important that you should be aware of its architecture most of the organizations have cloud service now which means it is hosted in servicenow data center and it cannot access the network of the organizations directly let's say we have sas now organization which has cloud service now now this service now instance cannot access the network of sas now company directly not even the devices of these organization like desktop database laptop and routers and many more devices then how exactly discovery can fetch the data of these devices over the network and then update them in cmdb which is in servicenow cloud in that case mid server comes into the picture which is a proxy server installed in the network of sas now organization and this mid server will be used to discover these devices with the help of discovery we will learn about mid server in details later sas now has a probe which is executed with the help of mid server and then mid server connects with these internal devices on the network and collects the information of these devices and send to servicenow for processing with the help of sensors now this mid server keeps on executing the probes to collect the information and send to service now which is processed by sensors and this data is updated in cmdb discovery process flow let's understand the steps involved in the complete flow of discovery while discovering the devices and processing to update them in cmdb we will understand with the same demo company sas now so we have sas now and servicenow for this sas now organization there should be a firewall in the sas now company network for external network sas now has a windows server which has to be discovered and should be updated in cmdb so let's say this sas now company implemented discovery and installed mid server in the internal network as part of the main components of discovery we create probes and sensors in the instance we also have eccq which is an out of the box module to manage messages from external systems there is a worker job which runs on mid server and monitors the ecc queue for new work to be performed if there is a new racket created as output with state ready then mid server runs the probe and ask it to collect the information and return the results to ecc queue which creates a new input racket then there is a sensor job which checks for the new input record in accq and if racket is found then relevant sensor reads the data and process it further which is updated or created in cmdb rackets the next topic for this section is components of discovery the question is how discovery finds configuration items and i will answer this question with the main components of discovery which are used to find devices and applications and those components are probes sensors and patterns what are probes and sensors probes and sensors are basically scripts that collect and process data on a host and then update them in cmdb probes are used to collect the information of devices and sensors are used to process those information collected by probes and update them in cmdb probes and sensors get the instruction from mid server via ecc queue and there is a worker job on mid server which monitors the queue and ask probes to collect the information what are patterns patterns are similar to probes and sensors they are series of operations that collect data on a host process it and update the cmdb if i talk about a scripting perspective then patterns are different from probes and sensors as patterns are written in nibula discovery language rather than javascript you can also customize your own patterns with the help of pattern designer next topic of this section is types of discovery there are two types of discovery horizontal discovery and top-down discovery horizontal discovery is a technique that discovery uses to scan your network find computers and devices and then populate that data into cmdb it also creates a relationship between cis as an example if there is a computer found by discovery and there is an application found on that same computer then discovery creates a relationship between these two ci's which is created in cmdb with runs on relationship horizontal discovery is not aware of business services and does not create relationship between cis based on business service they are in on the other hand top-down discovery is a technique that service mapping uses to find and map ci's that are part of business services which is basically not found by discovery as an example there is an internal website of your company which is basically a service that is hosted on a web server and connected to a database then service mapping will create the relationship between these two server and database cis let's understand horizontal discovery when discovery runs it discovers the devices in a particular ip ranges and applications installed on those devices if there are 10 servers then discovery will look for those 10 servers and update the cmdb and if you have multiple database or multiple applications then discovery will try to find those databases and applications together and update the cmdb and that's the reason it is called as horizontal discovery and it does not discover the relationship and dependency between these two systems which is done by service mapping in service mapping it goes from top to bottom in which it maps all the devices and components related to the business service you might have multiple web servers app servers and databases however individual servers have relationship and dependencies on individual servers and databases in relationship with the service and this is what service mapping discovers and update the cmdb types of horizontal discovery you can run different types of discovery to find different types of devices the first one is network discovery this type of discovery finds network devices of your organization which can be found with ip address ranges next is ci discovery this type of discovery finds computers and applications of your organization cloud discovery this type of discovery finds resources on aws or azure servers of your organization aws and azure are market leader in cloud services and the last one is server-less discovery this type of discovery finds applications on different machines without discovering the host the next topic of this section is phases of discovery and the first phase of discovery is scanning which scans for different devices next one is classification which classify what type of device is found and then we have identification which determines if a ci for device exists in the cmdb or not and the last phase is exploration which looks for the additional information of the same discovered device we will learn about these phases in details later in this series