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Discovery release notes

ServiceNow® Discovery product enhancements and updates in the New York release. Starting with this release, Discovery is part of the ServiceNow® ITOM Visibility application. For more information, see the ITOM Visibility release notes.

New York upgrade information

During upgrade to the New York release, the April 2019 (1.0.39) release of Discovery and Service Mapping Patterns is automatically installed for Discovery customers.

Important: It may make the upgrade time longer depending on your CMDB size. To decrease the upgrade time, install the Discovery and Service Mapping Patterns from ServiceNow Store before upgrading to the New York release.

The process of upgrading from Madrid to New York deactivates all Discovery schedules for cloud resources (VM). Schedules deactivated during the upgrade appear in the list view of the Discovery Schedule [discovery_schedule] table with a Run status of undefined. These schedules cannot be used to discover cloud resources either when run immediately or on the day and time configured. After upgrade, open your cloud schedules in the Discovery Manager and re-activate them.

ServiceNow now supports PowerShell 3.0 up to 5.1.

New in the New York release

File-based Discovery

File-based Discovery helps you identify what software is running on your Windows and UNIX servers and devices even if no registration information is available. You can manage records of your software licenses, check for unlicensed files, and detect forbidden, damaged, or unwanted files which is helpful for compliance and software audits. In the Madrid release, File-based Discovery was limited access only. In the New York release, File-based Discovery is available to all users who have Discovery.

All Discovery users get the File-based Discovery plugin [com.snc.discovery.file_based_discovery] when they upgrade to the New York release however, it will not be activated. To avoid impacting performance, File-based Discovery is disabled by default for all users.

IAM roles on AWS EC2 instance profiles

ServiceNow® MID Server applications running on AWS EC2 instances, properly configured, benefit from IAM roles configured with an EC2 instance profile. Discovery uses temporary security credentials that are retrieved via the AWS Instance Metadata Service. For more information, see Amazon Web Services documentation on IAM roles for Amazon EC2 and EC2 instance profiles.

Pattern deployment for IT Operations Management

Use the latest available patterns from the ServiceNow Store for horizontal and top-down discovery. Upon fresh installation or upgrade to the New York release, the Discovery and Service Mapping Patterns (com.sn_itom_pattern) plugin deploys the patterns from the ServiceNow Store on your instance. The Discovery and Service Mapping Patterns plugin is automatically activated when you activate the Discovery (com.snc.discovery) plugin.

VMware enhancements for ServiceNow® Software Asset Management (SAM) plugin.

Distributed resource scheduler (DRS) Affinity Rules restrict the movements of virtual machines to certain physical servers. You can now see the DRS cluster settings for your virtual machines via Discovery. This visibility helps the SAM compliance engine use the discovered DRS cluster rules for use cases for Publisher packs such as Oracle.

vCenter probes and probe parameters

The VMware - vCenter VM Tags probe discovers VMware virtual machine tags. You can attach VMware tags to vSphere objects, such as virtual machines, through the vSphere interface. Objects with tags are sortable and searchable based on the parameters you give the tags in vSphere.

Changed in this release

AssumeRole Enhancements for AWS Organizations

AWS Organizations support, previously introduced in the London release, now leverages fully configurable AssumeRole request parameters as dictated by the AWS Security Token Service AssumeRole API Action. For details on the specific parameters, see Amazon Web Services documentation for AssumeRole API Action.

Cloud Discovery

Discovery Manager wizard helps to quickly create cloud Discovery schedules. Select the accounts and subaccounts to discover, the credentials for accessing these accounts, and the MID Servers to scan the resources. You can add accounts and credentials with the wizard or go directly to Guided Setup to create an additional MID Server.

Discovery Home page

Discovery home page provides a new tile to view the results of a cloud Discovery. Click the Cloud Resources tile to display a chart of the different resources discovered.

GETBULK settings

GETBULK request allows you to retrieve a large amount of data in batches, reducing the number of requests and reducing latency. In previous versions, the SNMP probe parameter [use_getbulk] allowed you to configure GETBULK at the probe parameter only. Now, you can set for individual MID Servers or globally for all MID Servers using [mid.snmp.use_getbulk].

SNMP probe parameter [use_getbulk]
MID Server configuration parameter [mid.snmp.use_getbulk]
MID Server properties [mid.snmp.use_getbulk]

If you previously had this probe parameter set to Off, the global settings remain Off to avoid unnecessary issues. You can set the parameter to True to turn GETBULK on. If you previously had this probe parameter turned On, the global settings remain On.

IP address reconciliation

IP address reconciliation code has been updated to prevent duplicate IP addresses from being inserted in the IP address [cmdb_ci_ip_address]tables. Previously, some configuration items (CIs) with the same serial number under the same schedule could be discovered.

Probe to pattern migration

Probe to pattern migration is only supported for the New York release and later. See the Switching from Probe-based Discovery to Pattern-based Discovery [KB0694477] article in the HI Knowledge Base for more information.

Shazzam probe for SNMP devices

Shazzam probe now targets sysObjectID (OID) rather than sysDescr, because the latter can be empty. If there's no response, the Shazzam sensor doesn't trigger the SNMP - Classify probe.

Shazzam payload controls

Shazzam probe payload is no longer controlled by probe parameters. This payload is now controlled by the MID Server properties: shazzam.chunk_size, mid.shazzam.regulator.packets_per_interval, and mid.shazzam.regulator.interval_ms. The properties can be added to MID Servers and adjusted to change the probe payload settings. It's not necessary to add these properties because the Shazzam probe falls back on the default value of each property.

Windows Discovery optimization

A script is now run to offload work to the remote Windows systems to enhance efficiency of the Windows Discovery probe. It's a requirement that these remote Windows systems run PowerShell 2.0 or higher (up to 5.0) to allow the script to run properly.

The Windows-installed software probe has been updated to enhance performance. This probe now uses the admin$ share folder as the default. When the MID Server queries the target, the output is now written as JSON instead of XML. For more information on Windows Discovery, see the knowledge base article KB0752537.

There is a new probe parameter output_format that controls the output format of the probe and should not be changed. The probe post-processing script was updated to handle the new format. You must have a minimum of 10 MB of free space for this to work.

Windows Server 2019

New York release supports the discovery of Windows Server 2019 and Microsoft Hyper-V server running on Windows Server 2019.

Windows probes

All Windows probes using WMI protocol now use the admin$ share folder as the default to enhance performance. If another network share is mounted on each Window's target, the folder may be changed by updating the MID Server property mid.powershell.target_base_dir.

WMI Collector deprecation

Discovery and Service Mapping using patterns to discover Windows previously used WMI Collector. For the New York patch 10 release, ServiceNow is deprecating WMI Collector and substituting it with PowerShell on the host machine. This change will be transparent as long as your MID Server is running PowerShell 3.0 up to 5.1. See HI Knowledge Base article WMI Collector deprecation details [KB0791835].

Activation information

Discovery is available as a separate subscription from the rest of the Now Platform® and requires the Discovery (com.snc.discovery) plugin.

Accessibility information

The following accessibility improvements were made in the Discovery-related sections of the Information Technology Operations Management (ITOM) Guided Setup:

Improved screen reader accessibility (including alternative text to images and labels to text fields)
Improved color contrast of hyperlinks (in Discovery Quick Start)

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Discovery release notes

New York upgrade information

During upgrade to the New York release, the April 2019 (1.0.39) release of Discovery and Service Mapping Patterns is automatically installed for Discovery customers.

ServiceNow now supports PowerShell 3.0 up to 5.1.

New in the New York release

File-based Discovery

IAM roles on AWS EC2 instance profiles

Pattern deployment for IT Operations Management

VMware enhancements for ServiceNow® Software Asset Management (SAM) plugin.

vCenter probes and probe parameters

Changed in this release

AssumeRole Enhancements for AWS Organizations

Cloud Discovery

Discovery Home page

Discovery home page provides a new tile to view the results of a cloud Discovery. Click the Cloud Resources tile to display a chart of the different resources discovered.

GETBULK settings

SNMP probe parameter [use_getbulk]
MID Server configuration parameter [mid.snmp.use_getbulk]
MID Server properties [mid.snmp.use_getbulk]

IP address reconciliation

Probe to pattern migration

Shazzam probe for SNMP devices

Shazzam probe now targets sysObjectID (OID) rather than sysDescr, because the latter can be empty. If there's no response, the Shazzam sensor doesn't trigger the SNMP - Classify probe.

Shazzam payload controls

Windows Discovery optimization

Windows Server 2019

New York release supports the discovery of Windows Server 2019 and Microsoft Hyper-V server running on Windows Server 2019.

Windows probes

WMI Collector deprecation

Activation information

Discovery is available as a separate subscription from the rest of the Now Platform® and requires the Discovery (com.snc.discovery) plugin.

Accessibility information

The following accessibility improvements were made in the Discovery-related sections of the Information Technology Operations Management (ITOM) Guided Setup:

Improved screen reader accessibility (including alternative text to images and labels to text fields)
Improved color contrast of hyperlinks (in Discovery Quick Start)

Related ServiceNow applications and features

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Discovery release notes

Discovery release notes

New York upgrade information

New in the New York release

Changed in this release

Activation information

Accessibility information

Related ServiceNow applications and features

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Discovery release notes

Discovery release notes

New York upgrade information

New in the New York release

Changed in this release

Activation information

Accessibility information

Related ServiceNow applications and features

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