London IT Operations Management

London IT Operations
Management
Last updated: September 16, 2020

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 London IT Operations Management

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 London IT Operations Management

Discovery probes and sensors

Discovery probes and sensors perform data collection and update the CMDB.

Note: With each release, patterns are replacing many probes and sensors for
Discovery. Consider creating new patterns or editing existing ones if you want to
customize what Discovery can find. The information on probes and sensors is
intended for customers who are not using patterns yet and for customers who
already have customized probes that are retained upon upgrade. See Patterns
and horizontal discovery for more information on patterns.

Warning: DO NOT switch from probes to patterns if you are already running
Discovery with probes, and your CMDB is already populated. If you do so, it is
possible that the pattern Discovery process does not synchronize on the same
values that the probe Discovery process does. This could result in duplicate CIs in
your CMDB.

Discovery phases

Discovery always uses probes and sensors during the first two phases of discovery:
scanning and classification. For the last two phases, identification and exploration,
Discovery can use probes and sensors or patterns. This topic refers to probes and sensors
only. See Discovery basics for an explanation of these phases. See Patterns and
horizontal discovery for more information on patterns.

Probes, sensors, and the ECC queue

The probe collects the information and the sensor processes it. Both get their instructions
from the ECC queue. There is a worker job on the MID Server that monitors the queue for
work. The monitor checks for any entries where the Queue is output and the State is
ready.

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 London IT Operations Management

The MID Server then processes all the output ECC messages, runs the necessary probes,
and returns the probes results to the ECC queue. These results are put in the ECC Queue
as input entries.
ECC queue input

After an entry is inserted in the ECC Queue table, a business rule fires (on insert) that
takes that information and runs it through a sensor processor. The sensor processor's job is
to take the input data, find any sensors interested in that data, and pass it along to be
processed. Those sensors ultimately update the CMDB.

How probes and sensors work together

The MID Server launches probes to collect information about a device. The probe sends
back information to the sensor to be processed. If the probe has a post-processing script
defined, the post-processing script does some data processing on the MID Server before
data is sent back to the sensor on the ServiceNow instance. Otherwise the probes sends
back all the data collected and the sensor performs this data processing. In both cases,
the sensor updates the CMDB.

A multi-probe is a probe that contains probes. A multi-sensor processes the data from a
multi-probe. To process the data from the multi-probe, the multi-sensor contains
individual scripts to process the data returned by each probe contained in the
Multiprobe, as well as a main multi-sensor script. The individual scripts pass their
processed data to the main multi-sensor script.

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 London IT Operations Management

Probe types

Device Probe Type

Windows computers and servers Remote WMI queries, shell commands

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 London IT Operations Management

Device Probe Type

Shell command (via SSH protocol, version

UNIX and Linux servers 2). Discovery supports any Bourne-
compatible shell.

Storage CIM/WBEM queries

Printers SNMP queries

Network gear (switches, routers, etc.) SNMP queries

Web servers HTTP header examination

Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS) SNMP queries

• List of Discovery probes

A wide variety of probes exist for the Discovery application to detect elements on your
network.

• Discovery sensors

Every probe in Discovery must have a corresponding sensor to process the data
returned.

• Discovery probe management

Several discovery probes and their associated sensors are included with Discovery.
You rarely need to modify probes or sensors. But you might need to set parameters to
control the behavior of a particular probe or align versions of customized probes.

• Align versions of customized probes and sensors

If you customized a probe or sensor and upgraded to a new version of an instance,

you need to realign the versions of the customized probe and sensor to the most
current version.

• Discovery multiprobes and multisensors

Multiprobes contain one or more simple probes configured to extract specific

information from manageable devices by executing multiple queries with a single
authentication.

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• Example custom Discovery probe and sensor: populate a CI with text file values

This custom Discovery probe helps you if you need to read a text file from a Windows
computer and populate a CI in the CMDB with the values from the file.

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