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Discover and map your service assets
To achieve complete visibility into your enterprise infrastructure, you need reliable configuration data for your physical and virtual servers, computers, routers, switches, applications,
cloud instances, containers, serverless, and more. This means you need an updated configuration management database (CMDB) at all times. But visibility doesn’t stop there—you
need a view into how these assets work together to keep your critical business services up to date.
Mapping services uses two related ServiceNow® solutions: ServiceNow Discovery and Service Mapping. The level of visibility these solutions provide gives you valuable planning
and diagnostic assistance, helping you understand how the business is impacted by asset moves and replacements, unplanned outages, and migration to the cloud.
1. Get ready to discover and map 2. Discover or create application 4. Review and refine service
3. Fix mapping errors 5. Activate service and operationalize
assets services mapping
Though you can use the bulk mapping approach in Service Mapping, you should still make smart decisions about narrowing down your focus to reduce the time to review and
remediate any mapping errors.
Define business goals for discovery and service asset mapping Define the scope of both infrastructure and services
Focus on the most important business needs first. Communicate these business- Define the service scope, considering:
related goals first and foremost when working with stakeholders such as service On-premises versus cloud services
consumers and infrastructure groups. Example goals include:
Business units, service categories, or service lines
Reducing service outages
Geography (e.g., domestic versus international services)
Strengthening security strategies
Supporting a cloud-first or cloud migration strategy Define the infrastructure scope:
Get buy-in from your Infrastructure teams (server, network, and cloud) for their
Define the operational needs to support the business goals, such as: assistance in defining the scope of the infrastructure.
Understanding how the infrastructure is connected to applications Customers usually begin with on-premises servers, databases, networks, and
Monitoring changing cloud models and services applications.
Discovering shadow IT An expanded infrastructure includes storage arrays and a cloud infrastructure.
1. Get ready to discover and 2. Discover or create 4. Review and refine service 5. Activate service and
Steps map assets application services
3. Fix mapping errors
mapping operationalize
Create your service mapping team Identify the key as-needed stakeholders, such as the:
Server group – Make sure they understand how ServiceNow Discovery accesses
Create a core team that is responsible for project governance and ServiceNow
servers and finds software running on them.
configuration. Include:
Security group – Expect them to dictate where credentials are stored and to
Project sponsor – Responsible to design strategy to align business issues with provide role-based access to maintain patterns. You need to inform them of
ServiceNow solutions; enforces overall governance and alignment with business issues MID Server locations on the network.
Project manager – Expertise in planning, managing, and delivering software releases Network group – Make them aware of the network traffic impacts of discovery
Now Platform owner – Senior leader who leads the decision making for the platform
® patterns and probes. Consult them to learn more about network zones, firewalls,
with expertise in governance, business and platform strategy switches, and other devices delivering core business services.
ServiceNow system administrator – Assures the stability and performance of Now Application owners – Communicate that automated discovery requires support
Platform with expertise in application maintenance, user management and support from teams that own applications. Let them know that the application owner must
incident management, along with strong technical abilities remediate issues arising as a result of discovery.
Service mapping administrator – Sets up the Service Mapping application and maps, Configuration management team/CMDB administrator – Align with your
fixes, and maintains application services; also performs advanced configuration and configuration management team if it’s different than your discovery team. See our
customization of the product Success Playbook on planning your successful CMDB deployment to identify
their roles and responsibilities. They approve changes to CMDB.
ServiceNow service owner – Accountable for the full lifecycle of the assigned service(s)
to ensure they are providing value to the organization
1. Get ready to discover and 2. Discover or create 4. Review and refine service 5. Activate service and
Steps map assets application services
3. Fix mapping errors
mapping operationalize
Size your Discovery deployment based on your number of targets, geographic split, and number of security zones and firewalls.
Use the MID Server planning spreadsheet to calculate the number of MID Servers and probes needed for your environment.
Use MID Server clusters, which enable multiple MID Servers with the appropriate capabilities to be grouped together for load balancing and fail-over protection.
Practitioner insight: Refer to the Success Playbook on populating and maintaining your CMDB with ServiceNow Discovery for detailed how-to guidance to set up ServiceNow
Discovery.
1. Get ready to discover and 2. Discover or create 4. Review and refine service 5. Activate service and
Steps map assets application services
3. Fix mapping errors
mapping operationalize
Develop an effective credentials management strategy. Use one of the following options for proven results:
Use the internal encrypted table stored in the ServiceNow instance. With this strategy, it’s easier for you to keep a credentials table updated when there’s a change in
device credentials.
Use the local security vault that you’re already using. ServiceNow has out-of-the-box (OOTB) integration with CyberArk. Consult your security team for other
credentials management vaults. You can easily integrate these vaults with ServiceNow Discovery. Read the product documentation about using
CyberArk for your credentials' storage.
Learn the credential types that Discovery uses and the necessary credential(s)/access needed.
Practitioner insight: Align your credentials strategy with your network and security teams to avoid project delays.
1. Get ready to discover and 2. Discover or create 4. Review and refine service 5. Activate service and
Steps map assets application services
3. Fix mapping errors
mapping operationalize
Start with OOTB patterns, probes, and built-in APIs, limiting customization except where it’s necessary.
Get buy-in and input from stakeholders, including the server group, network group, security group, and the CMDB team.
Refer to the Success Playbook introduced in Step 1c on populating and maintaining your CMDB, and implement Discovery using six phases:
Architect Discovery.
Pilot Discovery.
Review your results and remediate.
Extend OOTB patterns for your own applications and products.
Move Discovery to production.
Service the relationship mapping.
Practitioner insight: Most customers (98%) are satisfied with the ServiceNow Discovery OOTB capabilities to support a large number of devices, applications, and
services. As a few examples, customers discover these OOTB elements to use without customization:
• Both physical and virtual servers with over 20 attribute and related record types
• Standard network devices including routers, switches, and load balancers
• 24 OOTB application profiles, including MS SQL, Oracle, and Tomcat
• Software installed with MSI (Windows), pkgadd (Solaris), and RPM (Linux)
• Application-to-application dependency mapping
• Logical network-to-server IP relationships
1. Get ready to discover and 2. Discover or create 4. Review and refine service 5. Activate service and
Steps map assets application services
3. Fix mapping errors
mapping operationalize
Refer to the Success Playbook introduced in Step 1c on populating and maintaining your CMDB with ServiceNow Discovery, to give you a great head start on how to use
ServiceNow Discovery to create the CIs that you’ll use to map out your services. Here are some key steps to get you on your way.
Monitor the number of duplicate records showing up in the CMDB, especially those with data from different sources.
Match all the CI classes being imported with those found with Discovery when reconciling discovery data from different sources.
Review the Discovery identifiers to ensure a match between the discovered and imported CI records.
1. Get ready to discover and 2. Discover or create 4. Review and refine service 5. Activate service and
Steps map assets application services
3. Fix mapping errors
mapping operationalize
Use MID Server clusters and behaviors to optimize your schedule performance.
1. Get ready to discover and 2. Discover or create 4. Review and refine service 5. Activate service and
Steps map assets application services
3. Fix mapping errors
mapping operationalize
1. Get ready to discover and 2. Discover or create 4. Review and refine service 5. Activate service and
Steps map assets application services
3. Fix mapping errors
mapping operationalize
For additional details on each step, refer to the Service Mapping setup section of the ServiceNow documentation site.
Install and configure your MID Server. MID Servers, which are located in the enterprise private network, facilitate communication between servers on the network and
some ServiceNow applications, such as Service Mapping and Discovery. For more information, see MID Server configuration for Service Mapping.
Configure the credentials required for Service Mapping to access applications inside your organization’s private network. See the
prerequisites for performing top-down discovery using Service Mapping.
1. Get ready to discover and 2. Discover or create 4. Review and refine service 5. Activate service and
Steps map assets application services
3. Fix mapping errors
mapping operationalize
For additional details on each step, refer to the Service Mapping setup section of the ServiceNow documentation site.
If your organization has a ServiceNow deployment with customized Discovery or CMDB attributes, perform the additional configuration described in KB0647574:
Preparing customized ServiceNow deployments to work with Service Mapping.
1. Get ready to discover and 2. Discover or create 4. Review and refine service 5. Activate service and
Steps map assets application services
3. Fix mapping errors
mapping operationalize
You can also create application services importing data in a CSV file, or even mapping services manually. However, many customers gain quicker, more accurate results by mapping
in bulk and correcting errors in a systematic way.
Create application service candidates in bulk Remove unwanted candidates from the “to be mapped” list
Service Mapping automatically creates application service candidates once the Focus on production application services—filter out load balancers in sub-
Service Mapping setup is complete. production environments.
Service Mapping extracts entries directly from load balancers on your network
and converts load balancer entries into potential entry points. If you want to map most of the candidate services, select individual candidates,
click Actions on selected rows and click Ignore selected.
Service Mapping checks that potential entry points created from traffic-based
connections are unique and not in use by any existing application services to avoid If you only want to create application services from a few candidates, select
duplication.
each candidate, click Actions on selected rows and click Discover selected.
Service Mapping creates an application service candidate for each entry point.
Practitioner insight: You can further filter the list of candidates by selecting specific ones to include in or Note: Starting with the Madrid release, Service Mapping refers to
exclude from discovery. Mapping only selected candidates provides the following advantages: services as “application services.” In previous releases, they are
• Reduces the discovery time referred to as “business services.” This aligns with the
• Minimizes the number of potential irrelevant application services Common Service Data Model.
1. Get ready to discover and 2. Discover or create 4. Review and refine service 5. Activate service and
Steps map assets application services
3. Fix mapping errors
mapping operationalize
This approach is useful if your organization has already performed cross- If bulk discovery missed some of your application services, you can
organization mapping and analysis and collected some information about create them manually.
planned application services.
You must know the application service’s entry point and owner to accurately
Prepare a CSV file for mapping your candidates. create and map the services.
An entry point is the way clients access an application service. Usually, it is either
Import the Service Map list. Here’s how: a URL or a combination of the ID address and port. Service Mapping starts the
Navigate to Service Mapping – Home. mapping process from this point. For example, to map your electronic mailing
application service, define an email address as an entry point. Entry points vary
Click Additional options under the Map tile. depending on the nature of the application service. Service Mapping comes with a
Click Import Service Map List. The imported application service candidates are wide range of preconfigured entry point types that cover most commonly used
added to the list of candidates. applications.
Check that the overall number of service candidates on the Map tile increased by The application service owner is familiar with the infrastructure and applications
the expected number. making up the service. This user is your application service SME who provides
information necessary for successful mapping of an application service. Once a
Click Map to create application services from the candidates you imported from service is mapped, this user reviews the results and either approves it or suggests
the CSV file. changes.
Update the application service record with an application service owner who
will review the completed service map for accuracy and approve it.
1. Get ready to discover and 2. Discover or create 4. Review and refine service 5. Activate service and
Steps map assets application services
3. Fix mapping errors
mapping operationalize
The best way to address these errors is to tackle them one root cause at a time, starting with technical errors in the bulk mapping process. When you correct these errors in bulk,
you’ll improve your accuracy much more efficiently than if you work on errors on a service-by-service basis.
1. Get ready to discover and 2. Discover or create 4. Review and refine service 5. Activate service and
Steps map assets application services
3. Fix mapping errors
mapping operationalize
The goal here is to fix errors preventing a CI from being mapped or a map being created. You’ll review the accuracy of the maps in Step 4.
Click View map next to the application service that you want to view.
Practitioner insight: If you know what CIs and connections make up your
Ensure that the map opens in Edit mode. business service, you can enable Service Mapping to continue discovery of the
business service even if there are some errors. You can skip errors to troubleshoot
If the service map contains several errors, group them by error type.
later so you can complete mapping most of the business service, even if some CIs
Refer to our product documentation on are missing.
fixing errors in individual application service maps for more information on
common error messages and resolutions.
1. Get ready to discover and 2. Discover or create 4. Review and refine service 5. Activate service and
Steps map assets application services
3. Fix mapping errors
mapping operationalize
Users who review and approve the service maps have the roles of a Service Mapping administrator and an application service owner. The Service Mapping administrator is
responsible for mapping, fixing, and maintaining application services. The application service owner is familiar with the infrastructure and applications making up the service. This
user is your application service SME who provides information necessary for successfully mapping an application service. Once a service is mapped, this user reviews the results
and either approves it or suggests changes.
Application service owner reviews application service maps and suggests corrections
Send individual application services for review. The system creates a service process task assigned to the application service owner and sends an email notification
about it.
The application service owner checks that the application service maps are complete and all major components comprising it are correctly represented. The application
service owner checks for the following:
Verifies that there are no missing CI connections
Verifies that there are no CIs that do not belong in the business service
Checks that the connections between CIs are correct
Checks that clusters are reflected correctly
If necessary, the owner leaves comments, referred to as reject messages, on application service maps for the Service Mapping administrator to implement. The service
process task assigned to the owner closes. The system sends an email notification to the administrator that the owner posted comments.
1. Get ready to discover and 2. Discover suggested services 4. Review and refine service 5. Activate service and
Steps map assets in bulk
3. Fix mapping errors
mapping operationalize
Receive and view the email notification from the service owner with refinement requests.
Resend the application service maps to the application service owner for review. The system again creates a service process task assigned to the business service owner
and sends an email notification about it.
If the revised application service maps are satisfactory, the application service owner approves them. If not, the owner requests further fixes that the administrator must
address.
1. Get ready to discover and 2. Discover or create 4. Review and refine service 5. Activate service and
Steps map assets application services
3. Fix mapping errors
mapping operationalize
Moreover, you’re ready to maintain and analyze service maps to support the key use cases that you identified in your initial goals—and beyond.
Define the criticality for application services to reflect how important it is to your organization’s operations.
Create a discovery schedule for an application CI to find changes and updates. You can define how often Service Mapping runs the discovery process for different CIs
and updates information about them.
Organize application services into groups to perform some actions simultaneously on multiple services.
Use service groups to control user access to services.
In Event Management, you can track service health by service groups.
1. Get ready to discover and 2. Discover or create 4. Review and refine service 5. Activate service and
Steps map assets application services
3. Fix mapping errors
mapping operationalize
Clear dependency mapping lets you guide effective incident and change management within a service. For information on connecting service mapping with IT service management,
check out the Success Playbook on automating incident and change management.
Plan the migration of an entire application service or its segments Analyze an application service for high availability and continuity
Use the map to see which CIs need relocating or which CIs have become Use the map to identify CIs crucial for the service performance. Decide if you
redundant. want to fortify these CIs by creating clusters.
Check the map to see what other CIs are affected when the CI is non- Use the map to understand the impact of an issue and determine which CI is
operational during maintenance. You can assess and plan the down time or causing the problem.
make provisions to avoid the down time.
Check the CIs using the Dependency Views application. Because the same CIs
may be used for multiple application services, with this application, you can see
all application services that a CI belongs to.
1. Get ready to discover and 2. Discover or create 4. Review and refine service 5. Activate service and
Steps map assets application services
3. Fix mapping errors
mapping operationalize
Strategic
Best practice insights
from customers, partners,
Critical and ServiceNow teams
processes
Practical Actionable
Expert
Management insights Technical Based on thousands of
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Common across the globe
pitfalls and
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