ServiceNow Vancouver: what's new? (part 4 - Discovery)

The ServiceNow Vancouver release brings updates / additions to the Discovery, CMDB and Agent Client Collector applications. This blog highlights the most noteworthy changes, updates and new features to these Discovery related applications.

Discovery related applications

There are updates & additions to the Discovery and Service Mapping Patterns, which include:

• Azure: Inventory, Database, WebSite, Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) Instance discovery, DNS Zones discovery, Functions discovery, Kubernetes Engine (AKS) cluster discovery
• Oracle Listener HD
• A10 load balancer
• Cohesity storage system
• Citrix Xen Hyper-V
• IBM PowerHA Cluster (HACMP)
• Pivotal Cloud Foundry BOSH
• Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)
• Dell EMC XtremIO storage array discovery
• Container image scans for software decomposition
• IBM WebSEAL HD

You will now be able to collect information about the life cycle changes in Microsoft Azure resources using Azure change processing. Allowing you to use Azure change processing APIs to effectively collect the information about the changes in the life cycle states. This method is more efficient than the legacy event-driven discovery.

Improvements in Event Management include:

• Improve the user experience and correlation logic for tag-based alert clustering. Alert correlation rules enable you to manually classify alerts into primary and secondary, and establish a relationship between them. Use alert correlation rules to group alerts that are related. Alert clustering tags enable you to create an alert group from fewer alerts.
• Let your operators access the knowledge articles that can help them do their jobs better through Agent assist.
• Increase the agility and time to value by adding a configurable, separate domain for alerts. Domain separation enables you to separate data, processes, and administrative tasks into logical groupings called domains.
• Get more information about alerts by using the alert tags mapping from non-CMDB tables.

Access all mapping functions easily from the new Service Mapping Workspace. Enabling you to increase efficiency with the redesigned Home page that offers access to all functions of Service Mapping:

• View mapped application services, mapped servers, and unmapped servers.
• View mapped application services by type, creation method, or criticality on one page.
• Access Automated Service Suggestions, which now allows you to map a new application service or enhance an existing one.

CMDB

There are whole host of changes and improvements related to the CMDB. Here are some of the more useful ones.

After upgrades and deployments of new applications or integrations, you can now run quick start tests to verify that CMDB works as expected. As always, if you have customised the CMDB, copy the quick start tests and configure them for your customisations, to keep the OOTB quick start test.

There have been some updates to the CSDM and to the CMDB Data Foundations Dashboards, which include managing performance of both by deactivating CMDB or CSDM metrics that you don’t need.

In the Insights view in CMDB Workspace, there’s the ability to use the Insights view in CMDB Workspace to see and increase the level of adoption of key CMDB features and application services. It’s using direct links to explore, set up and immediately start using those features.

The updated hierarchical map now lets you view the CIs (Configuration Items) and the relationships between them, by using the Unified Map feature in CMDB Workspace. Use the map to centrally see attributes, related items, changes, and application services related to CIs.

From the CMDB Workspace you can use the Intelligent Search to search the whole CMDB for a specific CI by entering the full or partial CI name without the need for a wildcard. This will search the entire CMDB and will return all CI’s with your full or partial CI name anywhere in the display name. Before, you had to use a condition filter by setting the field you want to search and then the condition (such as “contains”, ”is” or ”is not”).

Furthermore, you will now be able to view data reported by multiple discovery sources by viewing the Multisource Data Preview page in the CMDB Workspace. This highlights the discovery source values that are used as the current attribute values in the CMDB and shows how discovery sources are used to populate CMDB attributes.

Also, Discovery now lets you review the list of business services before converting them to application services. This way, you can prevent unintentional bulk conversion (this can't be undone) by selecting which services you want to choose and then reviewing the final list. At this final review, you can still have the option to add or remove items from the list before starting.

MID Server​

In this release, the MID Server pages and Dashboard have been updated with the Next Experience. Some other new MID Server features include:

• it will now run with Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 17
• the ability to insert Root CA Certification in the trust store and validate the code signing certificate before that certification can be used to validate signatures
• improvements to caching of credentials with external credentials vaults (such as CyberArk).

Agent Client Collector (ACC)​

In this release of ACC, you are able to monitor the health and performance of AWS Services, GCP Services and VMware vSphere services by using their own Monitoring Technology Dashboard. In the dashboard you can identify the CI’s with the highest metric readouts and view the most recent active alerts. You also will be able to monitor the health and performance of your system with the Windows log monitoring checks by using the Windows event log check, such as MS Exchange. And there are more improvements to the Metric Intelligence and the Metric Intelligence Advanced Promotion Engine. MacOS Ventura devices will now be supported by Agent Client Collector for Visibility.