all right I have one minute after the hour so we'll go ahead and get started welcome everybody this is scott Jacox from eco vest ik welcome to our webinar tips for cracking the CMDB code and solving business problems this is part 2 in our series for CMDB done right you alright go ahead and cover the agenda so we'll start with real quick introductions we'll do a recap of the first in the series the promise of CMDB talk a bit more about why CMDB efforts often fail talk about a proven approach to a successful CMDB we also have our partner quick nexus here who will demo their discovery admin solution and we'll wrap up with a recap and a open Q&A all right introduction so my name is Scott J Cox I lead our ServiceNow practice here at Coe vest ik we also have games Devine he is one of our senior solutions architects and we also have our partner Shivraj Bashara from quick nexus here a real quick overview of Kovac we were founded in 2001 we've always been in the IT service management consulting business and we've been a ServiceNow partner since 2012 roughly 225 consultants over a hundred ServiceNow project we maintain a CSF score of over nine and we maintain about a ninety percent repeat business KPI and should have all turned over to you to do a quick overview of quick necklace absolutely thank you Scott hello everybody this is chip from quick Nexus a little bit about quick nexus we were founded in 2016 and we have we focus exclusively on the CMDB in service now we've done more than 90 CMDB implementations over half of them have been with ServiceNow discovery and very bronze technology partner now we're absolutely going to talk about our product discovery admin but we're also going to focus on the best practices that we recommend that every customer every service now a discovery customer embrace when they're implementing ServiceNow discovery so with that over you James Thank You chef hello everyone James Devine senior solutions architect with kava stick as Scott mentioned this is part two in a two-part series on CMDB in the previous episode which you should be able to find online under the Cove s tech resources webpage you will find the previous episode which was focused primarily on the business side of CMDB and making the business case for it this is a more technical deep dive into some demos and tools and things that will actually make you be successful but just for those that weren't able to join us for the previous session let's just talk real quick about why we're discussing this the the CMDB has been a bit of an elusive target for many organizations for a dozen years it's it's a fantastic concept something that provides tons of benefits if you have have the means to have it up and running have it reliable have the data accurate and be able to maintain it going so when you have the definition of all of your business services and you have all of the CIS that support them and the relationships between them and you have that digital representation of your entire infrastructure that gives you tremendous maturity when it comes to things like your change management process being able to quickly identify risk impacts of potential changes based off of what CIS what business services are being impacted by those CIS incident management becomes much easier you get fantastic reporting capabilities you know exactly who you need to communicate out to if there's an outage based off of who is subscribed to which business services which ones are impacted and then we talked a little bit in the last session about customer service if you are utilizing ServiceNow for your customer service management and you are an infrastructure company you know immediately what the impact of an outage is to which customer base that you're you're dealing with so you really do get a lot of functionality there so there's a lot of really huge upsides to having team DB but as we all know this is the big scary number that Gartner puts out there that 70% of seem to be efforts fail they fail primarily for a couple of reasons one they're not given adequate resources as a separate process there's usually not a custodian or a librarian over overlooking the process and the data itself people organizations oftentimes try to be too technical and their approach to seem to be they say we have all this great data coming from old terrorists and SolarWinds is SCCM we're just going to dump all that into ServiceNow and call that our same VB that's great it's good to have that technical information but remember that seam DB is a business effort it is a business process and starting at the top down with your business services and working your way down from there and only consuming as much data as you can actually handle in the process is really the the best way to get to having an ongoing success story with your seem to be so with that I'm going to turn it over to Shiv who is going to give us some fantastic demos of not just ServiceNow and discovery but also the quick next that's discovery admin tool over to you should thank you James I'll go ahead and share my screen and would confirm that you can see my screen I'll get started right away looks good awesome alright hello everybody so as Jay mentioned this session is going to be about technology so I'm that actually going to jump right in and yes we are definitely going to talk about discovery admin and all how that works with and on the ServiceNow platform but before that let's talk about ServiceNow and what you need to have a great CMDB more from the technical standpoint now if you want to clarify the discovery admin is not an alternative to show you some discovery it basically simplifies the manual overhead associated with the maintenance of the CMDB and we require the service now seemed even service not discovery to have a great degree so with that said let's get a little bit of understanding in terms of what is underpinning or what does the ServiceNow CD we really really have on how we can use it to our advantage so the first is that the service of CMDB is a hierarchical relational and highly normalized data base now the relational portion of you familiar with the term relational database is you're also familiar with the term normalize databases but for some people on the call the hierarchical concept may be something that is that is near so the best way to explain a hierarchical database is like the name suggests it's a parent-child relationship so in tables that are in the parent side of the house which is maybe your attributes your business rules and it codes any configurations all of those capabilities and those features are intuitively inherited or passed down to the child tables and what that does it gives us an amazing amount of scalability by leveraging what is already been defined at the upper level and then extending that to a lower part of the table hierarchy so it's really what we use you from a from a coding standpoint all of that is not represented as a hierarchical database for the tables when I say tables in ServiceNow terms I actually means VI classes and most of us know that we have hundreds of CI classes CI attributes the AG relationships in the ServiceNow CMDB which can be directly leveraged but sometimes it is very overwhelming to see ok there's so much stuff out there where do I start what do I do so our recommendation is we leverage we rationalize our design with what ServiceNow discovery and service mapping will do now there's many reasons for that one is if you do use ServiceNow discovery insert is happening of course there's obvious synergies there but even if you don't ServiceNow is already rationalized and figured out what the data structure should be so in short they've given us this amazing data model that we can simply understand and embrace versus designing editing from scratch and again because of the hierarchical nature of the data model we can further extend that data model so essentially create child payables child classes in the ServiceNow terminology and leverage the existing recommendations that ServiceNow has already put together for us so we can accommodate these unique requirements while embracing the out-of-the-box capability of show design and if you take this approach towards thinking about the CMDB and the design of these attributes and CI classes you're already 10 steps ahead of anybody else who is so with the seemingly taken care of and you have the design in place you obviously have thinking about okay I got a pocket in that data right so here's five things that you need to think about when you're populating data and I'm going to go over these very quickly but really the first is of course manual data entry right and that is usually aligned with logical CID updates and relationships and that is a perfect strategy for the logical stuff the stuff that cannot be discovered the stuff that is in people's heads in various parts of the organization and that is definitely something that you would do of course you want to make sure you don't overdo it and you embrace automation as much as possible the second is one-time data imports and we usually associate these with deprecated sources so you may have an old tool or system that your Sun setting you may have signed out spreadsheets some just unstructured data that you're in the process of structuring and importing that it will show the same the next two are definitely the focus of our discussion service now this carbine service mapping now service our discovery is ideal for horizontal data and what we really mean by that and you've probably heard this term before but for those who haven't I want to discover all my service I want to discover all my network devices all my firewalls all my routers right so those are that's the perfect use case for ServiceNow discover where you take a single CI class or singles type of infrastructure and you go across your network and you partly discover and populate that in the scene DB service mapping takes a top-down or a vertical approach where you have the business service and then you look down from that business service so you start with your load balancers your web servers app servers operating system storage and you go all the way down in your infrastructure stack but it's only underpinning or supporting the business service or services that you've scope for service market and of course we also encourage third party solutions and integrations so you can think of those as active sources that are not necessarily in service now at the moment in the sense that you may have a CCM you may have other integrations that are accurate and you trust them and just make sense to integrate them import them clean them transform map them over into the ServiceNow MVP so when you're thinking of data population definitely consider these five use cases and figure out for each of the sources that you're working with or you should be target infrastructure items the configuration items that you're planning to have in your CVB which data population approach or strategy works best for those for that subset of CI classes once you have the data population in place where there's still a few things to consider and obviously these items are more around the ServiceNow discovery phase so we cannot narrowing down until you focus of our discussion today so when you talk about service discovery and service mapping the credentials mid servers and schedules are definitely something that is a precursor to initiating your service on discovery now credentials of course because you know service not discovered SCADA half-right we need to get the authorized approval from folks within the organization and it's a very deliberate it's a very intentional way to populate your CMDB the mid servers is service now technology that lives in your network that crawls your network it sends out probes and sends and and sensors across your network collectively times on the back to ServiceNow but the advantage of bending in your network is you don't have to poke external holes through your firewall so there's that additional level of security and that's how and that's why you would have the schedules are really about telling ServiceNow what parts of the infrastructure you wanna go after when and which fraction do not want to attach so this really helps with scoping it really goes with focusing on portions of the infrastructure that are valuable to you from a priority standpoint and those that you wants to be discovered in your cm data so with that taken care of the next part of course is optimal configurations and I'm also not you know should be just an on discovery how do we how do we just make sure we only have what we need and and here's the kicker here right we've seen too many times people just wanting to learn on discovery they get so much of data that they don't know what to do with it and it's really really very old building so recommendation is to focus on optimal configurations to align with only the portions of the infrastructure that you want to go after and more importantly the folks that are willing to work with you to help with the next step which is troubleshooting and remediation you see discovery is an engine and of course like any engine there is a need for troubleshooting there's a need for remediation to make sure that the next bullet of course the ongoing maintenance is taken care of like anything that we deploy in our environment so with optimal configurations a great strategy for troubleshooting and remediation from a technology as well as resources standpoint and the notion of having the ongoing maintenance just underpins your journey when you start off with service our discovery ensured snapping but here's if you think that you want to think about now when I say limitations I don't I'm not talking about the technology limitations the products discovery service mapping there's great products and they will do what they are supposed to did what they desire to do but where you often we come across customers and they say hey you know what our network it's cordoned off their firewalls and then and it's a very segmented network and if you want to discover your whole network and if you have those kinds of scenarios we want to be very prudent about identifying which segment of network or which segments of the network we want to go after and design the Midd servers accordingly so that you can actually access them so we have to leverage the technology to the best that it applies to our environment at least when you're starting and that definitely gonna increase the chances of our success when we deploy service on discovery and the same thing goes with service mapping so let's say you're discovering a business service but all of those underpinning vacations application instances that are supporting that business service they all have very unique configurations what's going to happen is the pattern when it reaches when it hits something that that's unique a configuration file it's going to choke so start with something that's more standardized that's more repeatable across your environment so we when you design even guest in building a service mapping pattern it just scares that much better you get more success and you can leverage assets and gain that momentum and then scale out across the different parts of your infrastructure so here are a few things you definitely want to consider before you even start or initiate your your your efforts for service now I discover each other stuff so with that let's dig a little deeper into discovery admin and what it can do for us but before we get into the core features and and you know how all of that works together we definitely want to talk about the business value now with discovery admin we have it at several customers they've analyzed millions of logs but the key thing is that it is native to ServiceNow which means there's no data leaving ServiceNow and it's based completely on these service out map and of course it's available on the service counter but let's talk about the business value and the business value is really around making sure that your CN VB is accurately maintained and reliably moving right so with a great CMDB what do you have like think about the other processes that are using the data because what we discussed before in the part 1 of the series is it's all about making sure the processes use the data which enables the data to be more accurate which enables the processes should leverage they got even more and that cycle continues so talking about ITSM was already referenced early in the fall inserting management change management problem management right something is broken what is broken right something is changing what is changing that is in the CMDB with item of course we have discovery and service mapping that's about a Python great but if you have event management orchestration right what are you automating right how can that be leveraged and scale well all of that is in the same VB and you need the team levy to be accurate reliable ICBM comprises of business services your application portfolio and where is that stored well the stored in the CMDB with the relationships that James with you earlier in the webinar today and of course security operations talks about vulnerability management security incident response and when you are securing your devices when you are identifying the deadly invulnerability on your portion of your infrastructure if that infrastructure isn't your scene BB just turbochargers are Musa the way you do security operations so as you can see the real business values not just about having great data it's about having these other processes other parts of the platform leverage this data and thereby have even a more increase or improve the accuracy of this is needed but when you're starting your journey with service on discovery or your audio journey your are five things that we recommend you absolutely absolutely think about for your for your implementation now these five things are also the core features of the story admin but let's put discovery admin on the side right now what we want to do is you want to explain to you these five core features of these five core things that we recommend should be a part of every successful service on discovery implementation and if you can embrace even one or more of these it's going to really help you with your implementation or your discovery application in your current show that sound so these five are really around configure troubleshoot customize remediated Bakula so let me go to each of these and shed some more light on that right so configure I've already mentioned this before right discovery admin can automatically proactively configure service I've discovered but the key here is to only enable what you want in the C and E be nothing more nothing less it is too easy to turn on discovery and it's too easy to have millions and millions of cis on the CMDB the real hard part is about just having what you need and the way to configure that it's not very hard at all if you look at your probes you look at your sensors you look at your triggered probe you look if you process particle fires look at you identify ways all of these have an active lab and you can surgically go in and enable and disable the active flag in your configuration to ensure that you only discovering or you're only telling ServiceNow to send out that those subsets of probes and sensors so that you only have what you really want in your scene today the next is of course all the students you've sent everything out you're getting data back now discovery admin can do that 100x faster and it's done an experienced administrator and if we have hundreds of predefined patterns underpinning the troubleshooting but that's the capability that we leverage for the troubleshooting in this context what really happens and what you can take away is we have predefined error codes with documented root cause and remediation so in your case when you look at your logs that we look at what's going on in your your instance as a part of the discovery logs you can very easily identify the patterns that are the 80/20 a few may and the root causes like what is really causing this issue and that way you can have those documented for remediation but there's one more thing right whenever whenever there's an error there's not just one log that is generated as caution several logs that are correlated with the error and what is important is the last bullet here which is to ignore within irrelevant errors eliminating false positives because when you look at or when you analyze those logs there are things you can correlate and say if there is this portion of this pattern in the log you can very easily eliminate these other logs because we D be the over overarching error is what the root causes and if you do not do that when your records are set to although that's number one and when your when you're going out to get help from other folks to to fix these issues you know the folks goes to the infrastructure you're going to get a lot of frustration and pushback from them and that's gonna kind of undermine the way a discovery's working for the next is custom acts right so yes you know we love to have a scenario where you installed ServiceNow discovery and we have everything discovered and likewise but with every environment there's definitely some things unique and you have some unique portions within your infrastructure you may have some unique tweaks to ServiceNow discovery to make it work for you to accommodate those customizations discovery admin of course has the ability to configure those rules within the product but more importantly what does is to take an example where you have your windows infrastructure it's us and its global and you have different teams that are responsible for remediating troubleshooting supporting those different parts of the infrastructure as a part of discovery troubleshooting you need to be able to have the granularity to know that these errors these devices go to this scene for help we're probably shooting remediating likewise and these others go to the other team and that level of granularity is something that you need to be thinking about when you are analyzing your loss so once you do that it's not just about hey here's an error here's especially with thousand records and we're going to ship it out to like 15 people and hope somebody responds it's got to be very very surgical if you want to get that due diligence or publisher right and the key here is of course wouldn't the app you can document these rules but if you have anywhere in your infrastructure in your environment where you can reference these rules where you can have a way to build on these that just goes a very long way I mean a fun fact but discovery admin and its first equation was spreadsheets right we wilted our spreadsheets and we had all these rules and especially before maturing to a scope tap and ServiceNow so all of this can very well be developed created internally as you mature your troubleshooting and how you manage your discovery implementation now remediate so this is definitely a fairly technical call but once we figure out what is wrong we need to reach out to other folks within the organization so that they can fix the issues on their infrastructure on their infrastructure CIS so that we can effectively discover them on an ongoing basis now what the savvy admin does is it uses incidence right so it also generates an incidence in auto-assignment to the correcting and it details the the root cause and remediation and we can show all of that usually after during the demo but the key here is you if you're using spreadsheets that's fine incidents we believe is a great way because you know you get that inherent SLA to engage the resources that you're working with but it's very important to provide those good cause and remediation steps so you can't just say hey your release the device is not being discovered you know figure it out and let us know no you have to be more proactive at our end so make sure we really guide them through sexless they have their day job and we want to make it really easy for them to help us right and of course I didn't mention this before false positives the more you can eliminate them think of it this way right if you give them something that they don't support or that's really not an error it's just going to reduce their capability to support you on things that I've really really gone wrong so we want to make sure from a remediation standpoint where again very proactive about it and finally pocket it now populate is a it's not a how to put a discovery we build on discovery when we talk about popular right so let's take infrastructure strategy let's say your 10,000 see eyes and the you have being a good set of rich attributes that are discovered but sometimes we do have manually maintained attributes on these infrastructure so I think what owned by managed by and things along those lines support group now I just added three attributes of 10,000 see eyes and suddenly the manual overhead to maintain those we've gone up to 20,000 data elements right and unfortunately that's a human error I'm sorry a human exercise and just may end up with some doing some errors associated with it so what we do with Discovery admin is we add these rules so when you add some behave while you're populating dispersion of this group this oh yeah it's the CI class it starts with so and so it's really letting data center you know so there are attributes that are already on the CI that the the user of the human is using to populate those manually meeting athletes well guess what you can configure those rules capture them at one time and it completely automates the population of these manually making attributes and of course that's an activity reliable seem to be right now this of course can be done with business rules so if that is something that you do have in mind relatively straightforward but definitely think about populating these manually making attributes but think of it this way these five steps if you can embrace as a part of one or more as a part of your discovery implementation is going to go a really long way in the overall health of your discovery and of course your your tmdb actors now successful to discovery and of course there's various ways to engage this project-based subscription managed services but I'm going to spend too much time there you can definitely reach out to us if there are any questions along that way but now I want to kind of get into the the meter flip right so what we want to do you actually want to demo how it works so you have a better understanding of some of the features and capabilities and also how you can leverage that in your own in your own service talents and we have a five minute demo video just for that which I'll be playing right now discovery admin by quick Nexus featured on the ServiceNow store this video is a technical walkthrough of the core features of discovery admin the application has three roles customer user customer admin and quick Nexus admin let's start with the customer user go to the filter navigator type discovery admin to see the list of modules available in the left navigation going down the list of modules under discovery admin we have under section execute and analyze discovery status which points to the list of recently run discovery schedules troubleshooting we're the troubleshooting and analysis of these discovery statuses takes place and recent incidents which links to the recently generated incidents as a part of the troubleshooting the next section report has the module log analysis log analysis contains the results of the troubleshooting for further analysis and reporting in section support which contains the module contact quick nexus to contact quick nexus support to start the customer user goes to the discovery status module to identify one or more discovery statuses for troubleshooting then in the troubleshooting module click new to generate a new troubleshooting record on this new troubleshooting record you will see the status of a waiting input so let's go ahead and select one or more discovery status as we want to analyze after which we select discovery status selection complete notice the status now says ready for analysis we always have the option to modify our discovery status selection or if we are ready we can simply click execute error code analysis notice the status now says analyzing discovery logs right now discovery admin is analyzing deduplicating and consolidating the error logs to generate a comprehensive set of pre-configured incident error codes with predefined root cause and remediations the analysis happens at about 1,000 discovery logs per minute and when complete the status is updated to analysis executed and now we can simply click generate incidents this generates the relevant incidents and updates the status to incidents generated and what you see in the recent incidents module is a single incident generated per incident error code as determined by discovery admin each incident not only has the correct attributes including assignment group and short description pre-populated it also has instructions detailing the root cause and remediation steps necessary for the assigned a team to resolve the issue along with a consolidated list of all the devices associated with this incident and recode however if we don't want to generate incidents at this time we can simply go to the log analysis module to see the results which can be intuitively grouped or reported on and this covers what we can do as a customer user now let's highlight the additional features available to the customer admin the first set of features is under the section setup which has links to the relevant modules in the ServiceNow discovery application the next section configure has links to incident error codes and incident error code mappings to configure additional customer specific rules and control the generation of incidents the section administration has a module initialization script to auto configure discovery admin to ensure it has the right access to read the required tables in service now finally let's highlight the additional features available to the quick nexus admin the quick nexus admin has access to the base error code and error code mapping repository additionally we can also apply discovery configurations to auto configure discovery and configure calculated attributes to enable the auto population of manually maintained attributes in the CMDB this concludes the technical walkthrough of the core features of discovery admin quick nexus CMDB done right we focus exclusively on the CMDB and ServiceNow now all of this the product that we have it is a scopes application we actually are featured on the serviceman store so one of the few apps that is featured on the ServiceNow store you can access the store listing directly by going to discovery admin calm but what I've shared right now including the abdomen all and that is also they would live here if you have any questions of course please reach out to us and we will be happy to answer any more questions right so this was I mean going back to the demo this was we be under under the hood of what discovery admin is but in my right mind I cannot have a technology conversation without talking about process and we emphasize that so much in our the part one of the webinar series we think you sit this way technologies we enabler and the process is really what makes it happen so just for scratches on the surface the process by phases plan design run report audit this is fundamentally what configuration management is about and if you're doing CMDB with that process it's like doing incident without incident management it's by doing change without change management if you're doing CMDB you have to have to have two new configuration management so I just want to highlight that it's definitely something that you can you have to think about and we can of course watch you with that and of course we spoke about the alignment it's gonna make sure I've been speaking the same language and if you're not sure okay where do I start what to do let's do the right thing we have a very mature way to guide you or guide you through that process but with this what we're really saying is that these are the core aspects of what you need to do to have a tmdb done right with that Thanks over to you all right thank you sure that was fantastic now I'll say this I've been implementing service discovery for better part of eight years and this is the discovery admin tool the quick-quick Nexus tool is probably the best thing that I've seen happen to it and in several years it certainly makes it much much easier to maintain and work with the massive amounts of data that we can get and it helps us overcome one of those big barriers to successful CMDB which is over reliance on technical solutions way too much data so you know that's a really nice introduction to how service now works with Discovery and the quick Nexus Discovery admin tool if you are interested in seeing that firsthand will be at knowledge 18 in Las Vegas is coming may as well confess Nick we will both have booths set up there so if you would like an opportunity to see that in action work with it yourself you're certainly invited to come do so you don't have to wait for knowledge however if you are interested in a deeper dive into that feel free to contact us and we can set up time to talk more about the discovery I've been tool discovery and or seem to be in general and talk a little bit about how to do a full assessment of your your current seem to be in how to get you to that promised land of the the capabilities so with that I think it is time for questions and answers and if you have any questions or have had a chance to please feel free to put those into the chat and we will answer whatever questions we have time to take it to right this is Scott looks like this one's for you Shiv can you describe what the implementation or setup of Discovery admin looks like and is it something that you find customers can self implement sure so they set up what we say is that if you are discovering an on crowd within 16 minutes we can give you a report with all the errors that that that you should be thinking about for your for your discovery elimination so it is the value is that quick in terms of realization as you saw on the demo there are a few things that are unique to your environment and we do expect to have a closer working relationship to make sure you have all of those rules in place but typically a typical discovery implementation if you want to get it up and running it's usually between four to six weeks and we can roll in the implementation of discovery admin as a bottom level so play that answers your question and this is for a a midsize implementation of course of view global data center is a very complicated environment let's let's talk about that in person okay thank you a similar question can the customizations you described in the demo be self implemented yes so B if you saw they the incident error codes that was a part of the customer admin role so the example that I showed you the customer plus quick nexus those were things that we've worked with the customer and this customer example but absolutely you can add your own rules as a part of the ongoing use of the product independent of us and we'll obviously enable you to do that as a part of the redeployment implementation both okay great thanks again Shiv you guys didn't talk a lot about service mapping its discovery admin associated with just ServiceNow discovery or does it touch service mapping - excellent question right so we know that so short answer is a service mapping way more complicated when it comes to patterns right so what discovery admin does for service mapping is the phase 1 phase 2 phase 3 troubleshooting service mapping options the users patterns and there's a very high level of customization associated with that but when we work with customers we recommend they hack the discovery and order prior to service mapping and leverage the phase 1 phase 2 phase 3 of what they've done with discovery then just focus on the exploration probes the patterns for service mapping so in that context there's a very high overlap but to be very honest the the creation of the patterns and all of those very unique things the discovery admin product cannot do it as a fan okay great and I think that is all for questions I guess if any other questions come in between now and when we shut down the webinar we will reach out to you directly with answers you you this this final slide is obviously our contact information if you have any questions for us regarding configuration management in general the discovery admin solution feel free to reach out to us and we'll get right back to you and try to schedule some time so with that that concludes today's session I want to thank everybody for taking time out to join us and again back to knowledge 18 if you can make it we hope to see you there thanks very much