Load balancer discovery

Discovery can collect data about network routers, switches, and applications.

Discovery supports data collection from the following applications and hardware:
  • A10
  • Apache mod_jk and Apache mod_proxy
  • Big-IP F5 Traffic Manager
  • Cisco
  • Citrix NetScaler
  • HAProxy
  • NGINX
  • Alteon
  • ACE
  • Radware
Important: Discovery treats load balancers as licensable entities and attempts to discover them primarily using SNMP. If a load balancer in your system, running on a Linux host, has SNMP and SSH ports open, Discovery might classify it based on the SSH port. This classification has priority over SNMP. To ensure that Discovery properly classifies your hardware load balancers, create a Discovery behavior for load balancers that includes SNMP but not SSH. Software load balancers are treated as applications.

Load balancer patterns

Starting with the Jakarta release, Discovery uses out-of-box patterns to find some types load balancers for new instances (see table).
Note: For information on Probe to Pattern migration see the knowledge article KB0694477.

To use patterns, verify that the correct pattern is specified in the horizontal pattern probe on the classifier. See Add the Horizontal Pattern probe to a classifier for instructions.

Load balancer discovery, Service Mapping, and customized CI fields

Discovery collects information about the install status and operational status of load balancers. If you are using Discovery with Service Mapping, do not customize the [operational_status] or [install_status] fields. By default, Service Mapping ignores all host CIs for which the value of the [operational_status] field is not 1 (Operational) or the value of the status [install_status] field is 100 (absent). For additional information, see Preparing customized ServiceNow deployments to work with Service Mapping [KB0647574] in the HI Knowledge Base.