When Discovery explores your networks, one of the methods it uses is the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). When a device at an IP address responds to SNMP, the first thing Discovery has to do is answer this (seemingly simple) question: What is that thing?

The reason this isn't as straightforward as you might think is that SNMP provides no method to ask a device “What are you?” Instead, SNMP lets you explore a device's capabilities – and from them, you can infer what sort of thing it is.

Some enterprises have their networks divided into broad, sparsely-populated IP ranges. One enterprise we know uses a /18 (like 10.21.0.0/18) network for each of their locations, large or small. A /18 network has 16,382 possible IP addresses – but there may be only 100 devices actually in that range at a small location.

Now that's no problem for Discovery today. You can create such a range, and Discovery will happily go off and explore it. The challenge lies in how long the initial ping operation takes: at 2 seconds per ping, that's over 9 hours of pinging – and today, nothing else happens until that initial pinging is complete.

This is my first attempt at videos. The only thing I have done is checked with a few of my Service Desk techs to see if it made their ears bleed listening to me. I am still working on fixing the audio level but no blood was noticed.

I did have to add the related list Delegate->User so that the technician can see who they have assigned as their own delegates. The Delegate->Delegate list (shown out of box) shows who has you as a delegate to work their issue while out.

For anyone wondering, I am using Camtasia Studio 5 and it is very user friendly for novices.

There's too much information!

I've seen this reaction several times when people get their first view of what Discovery finds and puts in the CMDB – it's way more than they expected, and having all that information viewable by their service desk staff worries them. Sometimes the worry is related to security or privacy, but most commonly the worry is about overloading the service desk staff with information.

So the next question I get is “How can I reduce the scope of what Discovery discovers?”

The next release of our project includes many spiffy new features in Discovery, one of which is the discovery of manageable Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPSs). The screenshot at right shows what a discovered UPS looks like in the CMDB. The example is for a small test UPS that's sitting on my desk.

This module is a link to a list of records on the incident table, where the following filters are applied:

1. The 'Caller' field is populated with the users who is currently logged in.
2. The 'Active' field is set to true.

The view associated with this module is the 'ESS' view, or the view for those users that are considered customers or end users.

If you've been poking around in the Discovery application, you may have noticed an intriguing little box on the schedule form: the “Discovery Type”. It gives you three choices: Basic, Advanced, and Networks. What do those things mean?

In this post, I'll discuss two of those choices (Basic and Advanced). I'll leave the third choice for another post.

(note: the photo at right is not me)

So if you're into Twitter you will probably find this list of Service-now.com employees who tweet useful. If you have no idea what Twitter is, here is a definition (in 140 characters or less) Twitter is micro blogging based on the question, "what are you doing?"

Service-now.com was graciously invited by Mark Storace, IT Service Management Professional Association founder and CEO, to provide the vendor spotlight for the ITSMP-a Q408 newsletter. We jumped at the opportunity as we see current market forces colliding in our benefit. The economy and customer abuse by HP and BMC are driving ITSM professionals to find a better software alternative. Of course, Service-now.com can be the answer to many of these troubles.