ServiceNow®
Discovery product enhancements and updates in the Orlando
release.
Orlando upgrade information
If you already have Discovery and plan
to upgrade to the Orlando release, the Discovery and
Service Mapping Patterns (com.sn_itom_pattern) plugin version 1.0.52 are
automatically installed when you upgrade to Orlando.
ServiceNow now supports PowerShell 3.0
up to 5.1.
New in the Orlando
release
-
Certificate Inventory and
Management application
- Discover and take inventory of all your TLS certificates using
Certificate Inventory and Management, keep informed of impending expirations, create
certificate tasks via flows to renew expiring certificates, create incidents for
already expired certificates, and prioritize certificate importance. This feature
helps you proactively manage your certificates and avoid manually tracking large
volume of certificates, and prevents costly outages due to expired certificates.
- Make sure the ITOM Visibility [com.snc.itom.vis.license] plugin, Discovery [com.snc.discovery] plugin, and Configuration Management for
Scoped Apps (CMDB) [com.snc.cmdb.scoped] plugin are installed and activated and you
have upgraded to the Orlando release. You can then download the
Certificate Inventory and Management application from the ServiceNow Store.
Certificate Inventory and Management allows Discovery to automatically
scan for any IP-based certificates on specific ports through your existing Discovery schedules. You can also add individual URLs to a
Discovery schedule.
-
In Version 1.1.7 Certificate Inventory and Management, you
can also scan for certificate authorities (CA) and import certificates from
files.
- Loopback adapter filter
- Network loopback adapters on SNMP devices using probes or patterns can be discovered
and added to the CMDB by enabling the Discovery property:
glide.discovery.allow_loopback_adapters.
- Microsoft Just Enough
Administration (JEA) for Discovery
- MID Servers now support Microsoft
JEA authentication in order to run basic Discovery. Microsoft JEA enables role-based administration through
PowerShell Remoting, which uses Windows Remote Management (WinRM) to manage
communication and authentication. PowerShell Remoting is enabled by default on
Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows Server 2016.
- Performance Analytics Content
Pack for Cloud Resources
- See the aggregated view of all Cloud resources on this dashboard for combined
analytical views and visual summary as well as detail of all your Cloud resources.
There are also new analytics tables and views that associate tags with resources so
that you can build your own custom dashboards and reports. The Performance Analytics
Content Pack for Cloud Resources works with Discovery and Cloud Provisioning and
Governance and supports these Cloud providers: AWS, Azure, and VMware.
-
Discovery properties
-
Control several aspects of the horizontal discovery process
through Discovery properties.
- glide.discovery.certs.cert_admin_user_id:
Holds the user ID of the user who will be referenced in the certificate task and
incident, created via a Scheduled Job.
- glide.discovery.certs.days_before_expiration_to_create_renewal_task:
Number of days before certificate expiration that a renewal task should be
created.
- glide.discovery.certs.enable_incident_creation_for_expired_certificates:
Enables the Scheduled Job to create the incidents for expired certificates.
- glide.discovery.certs.enable_renewal_task_creation_for_discovered_certificates:
Enables renewal task creation for all discovered certificates.
- glide.discovery.allow_loopback_adapters: Allows network
loopback adapters on SNMP devices to be discovered via probes and added to the
CMDB.
- Shazzam probe
parameter
- TLS_keepOriginalCertificate: Enable the certificate_file field
in the cmdb_ci_certificate to be populated with the original certificate by using the
TLS_keepOriginalCertificate parameter. This parameter is
available for fine-tuning the Shazzam probe and is defined in the probe record only.
If you want to enable the original certificate attachment for discovery, you need to
manually add the TLS_keepOriginalCertificate probe parameter and
set it to True. Note that this can increase your payload size.
-
In Version 2 Certificate Inventory and Management, the
TLS_keepOriginalCertificate probe parameter is already
available.
- SNMPv3 context
- SNMPv3 with context data attributes is now supported.
- VMware enhancements for the ServiceNow®
Software Asset Management (SAM) plugin
- Discover DRS affinity rule
settings from VMware.
These settings control the placement of virtual machines on hosts within the cluster
by using affinity rules. You can discover three types of rules from VMware to support this capability:
- VM-Host Affinity Rules [Virtual Machines to Hosts]
- VM-VM Affinity Rules [Keep Virtual Machines Together]
- VM Anti-Affinity Rules [Separate Virtual Machines]
- Discover devices
and applications using the latest patterns
-
Discover the following devices and
applications by using the latest available patterns from the
ServiceNow Store:
- AWS generic inventory
- Google Cloud Platform (enhancements: IaaS
labels and events)
- IBM Cloud (enhancements: IaaS labels)
- IBM HACMP
- IBM HMC
- Oracle Database 12c
- Red Hat OpenShift
During installation or upgrade of
ITOM Visibility to the
Orlando 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 (com.sn_itom_pattern) plugin
is automatically activated when you activate the Discovery
(com.snc.discovery) plugin.
Changed in this release
- Help the Help Desk
-
ServiceNow® constantly evaluates product
capabilities, to over time reinvent or replace older features with more modern
alternatives to improve overall customer value, always under careful consideration
of backward compatibility. The Help the Help Desk feature is going through the
deprecation process in the Orlando release. You can no
longer activate the Help the Help Desk plugin.
- IP service table
- The IP service table [cmdb_ip_service] now pushes updates to the
customer update directory so you can edit the ports you want to scan for
certificates.
- Linux discovery
- The Linux net-tools package is no longer provided in new Linux distributions. Linux – Network and Linux – Network ARP
Tables probes will first try to use Net-tools commands. If that attempt doesn't work,
these probes fallback to iproute2 commands instead.
- PowerShell version
- ServiceNow now supports PowerShell 3.0
up to 5.1.
- Probe to pattern
migration
- The following improvements were made to the probe to pattern migration process. For
more information, see the referenced HI Knowledge Base articles.
- Shazzam probe performance
optimization
- A Shazzam probe uses queue-based instead of chunking to manage and distribute its
workload. This removes the setup and teardown costs of chunking and the queuing
mechanism lends itself to multi-threading and increased throughput. The
mid.shazzam.threads and mid.shazzam.max_scanners_per_thread MID Server
parameters enable this enhancement.
- SNMP OID
classification
- Thousands of additional SNMP devices are now supported through augmenting the list
of device OIDs and mapping those OIDs to appropriate classifiers to be used in Discovery.
- Exclude IP ranges from a
Discovery range set
- Before a Discovery schedule is run, the number of excluded IP
addresses is totalled. If there are more than 500,000 excluded IP addresses, the Discovery is cancelled and an error is logged through DiscoveryLogger
regarding its status.
- WMI Collector deprecation
- Discovery and Service Mapping using patterns to discover Windows
previously used WMI Collector. For the Orlando 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].
- Windows Discovery
- If WMI is failing due to no access to $admin or PowerShell is not installed, see
KB0753561.
- Pattern Designer
enhancements
- Use the latest enhancements for creating new or modifying existing
discovery patterns:
- Disable pattern steps to make the ServiceNow®
MID Server skip them while running a pattern.
- Add a precondition to shared libraries that are reusable
collections of steps.
Activation information
Discovery is available with activation of the
Discovery [com.snc.discovery] plugin. For details, see Request Discovery. If you're activating the Discovery plugin for the
first time in the Orlando release, install the Discovery
(com.snc.discovery) plugin first, then install the Discovery and Service Mapping
Patterns (com.sn_itom_pattern) plugin version 1.0.52 for Cloud Discovery to work. You can then upgrade
to Orlando.
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