Discovery, Service Mapping, and Event Management

Are you a ServiceNow professional looking to streamline your IT operations and gain a clearer understanding of your infrastructure? ServiceNow offers a suite of powerful tools, including Discovery, Service Mapping, and Event Management, that can significantly enhance your ability to manage and monitor your IT environment. However, understanding the nuances and differences between these applications is crucial for effective implementation and utilization. This article will break down the core functionalities of each, explain how they interact, and highlight how they contribute to a more robust ServiceNow experience.

Understanding the Core Differences

At a high level, these three ServiceNow applications serve distinct but complementary purposes.

• ServiceNow Discovery: Discovery is a "horizontal" exploration tool. Think of it as casting a wide net to identify all the IT infrastructure and applications connected to your TCP/IP network. Given an IP address range and appropriate credentials, Discovery scans each address, identifying and classifying devices or hosts. For each discovered item, it creates or updates Configuration Items (CIs) within the ServiceNow Configuration Management Database (CMDB). Discovery provides a broad overview of your IT landscape and can map dependencies between applications. This information is invaluable for Asset Management and other ITIL processes, such as incident and change management, where understanding individual CIs is critical.

  
  

• ServiceNow Service Mapping: In contrast to Discovery, Service Mapping takes a "vertical" approach, focusing on the infrastructure and applications that directly support specific business services. It performs a top-down discovery, starting with a business service and mapping all the underlying components and their relationships. This is like using a sniper rifle instead of a shotgun. Service Mapping only uncovers the infrastructure tied to the business service, providing a complete and up-to-date picture of the service configuration. After mapping a service, Service Mapping performs routine re-discoveries to identify changes, such as server additions or removals, software updates, or configuration changes. The resulting service maps are essential for impact analysis during incident and change management, helping you understand the potential consequences of planned changes.

  
  

• ServiceNow Event Management: Event Management acts as a central hub for aggregating events from various monitoring tools like SCOM, Nagios, and SolarWinds. It processes these events to generate actionable alerts, which can be automatically linked to CIs. When those CIs are related to business services (thanks to Service Mapping), the severity of alerts can be used to determine the impact on those services. Event Management consumes the service maps created and maintained by Service Mapping, providing the context needed to perform root cause analysis and identify the likely cause of service outages. Additionally, understanding the criticality of a business service helps prioritize alerts and automate incident creation or remediation tasks.

  
  

Enhancing Business Mapping: How Discovery and Event Management Contribute

Discovery and Event Management play unique roles in enhancing business mapping and overall service visibility.

• Discovery's Role: While Service Mapping focuses on mapping specific business services, Discovery provides a broader understanding of the IT landscape. By populating the CMDB with detailed information about all discovered devices and applications, Discovery lays the foundation for Service Mapping. It provides the raw data that Service Mapping can then leverage to build its service maps.

  
  

• Event Management's Role: Event Management provides real-time insights into the health and performance of business services. By consolidating events from various monitoring tools and correlating them with CIs and service maps, Event Management enables proactive identification and resolution of issues before they impact end-users. It turns the static map provided by service mapping into a dynamic view of service health.

  
  

Practical Examples and Use Cases

• Example 1: Server Upgrade Impact: Imagine you're planning a database server upgrade. Service Mapping can show you which business services rely on that database, allowing you to proactively communicate potential downtime to affected users.

  
  

• Example 2: Incident Root Cause Analysis: A critical business service experiences an outage. Event Management identifies a server as the probable cause. Service Mapping visualizes the server's relationships to the service, confirming the impact and guiding your remediation efforts.

  
  

• Example 3: Proactive Problem Management: Event Management detects a potential performance issue on a key server identified by Discovery. You can proactively investigate and resolve the problem before it escalates into a full-blown outage.

  
  

Key Considerations

• Licensing: Discovery, Service Mapping, and Event Management are typically licensed by node, where a node represents a physical or virtual server. However, a business service CI created by Service Mapping does not consume a node license.

  
  

• Plugin Dependencies: Enabling Service Mapping activates the Event Management and Service Mapping Core plugin, which provides shared components. However, it doesn't automatically enable the full Event Management application, which is a separate plugin.

  
  

• Independent Use: Service Mapping can be used without Event Management, but Event Management relies on Service Mapping for service context and impact analysis.

  
  

• Real-time Monitoring: While Service Mapping discovers and maps services, it doesn't provide real-time monitoring of system status. This is where Event Management comes in, integrating with monitoring solutions to provide up-to-the-minute insights.

  
  

Taking the Next Steps

Understanding the differences between ServiceNow Discovery, Service Mapping, and Event Management is essential for optimizing your IT operations. Discovery provides a comprehensive view of your IT infrastructure, Service Mapping maps the relationships between IT components and business services, and Event Management provides real-time monitoring and alerting. By leveraging these tools together, you can gain unparalleled visibility into your IT environment, improve incident resolution times, and proactively manage service performance.