Overview
The MID server sits on site at Yale and is the focal point for discovery and workload automation tasks in ServiceNow. The first phase of the rollout (ITS 50 - Discovery) is to implement the Discovery module, including deployment of the MID Server. See attachment for vendor-suppied task list. Some of the design & setup effort is already underway.
Current Status
Based on 11/8/2011 meeting with Bill West, Howard Gilbert, Jessica Greer, Fruition's James Devine (Sr. Technical Analyst specializing in Discovery) and Chris Damon (Yale's Engagement Manager for Service Now).
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Yale's technical team expressed security-related concerns about granting shell access on all datacenter Unix servers and asked Fruition to help us understand what was required to perform discovery via SNMP.
James explained that 60% of discovery functionality is driven by probes that check network traffic and processes; the remaining 40% is inventory (OS, location, processor types, etc.). Probes are commands sent from a Service Now instance to a MID server and on to clients. All stock Service Now probe code is available to us. There are 117 total stock probes, 74 of which are are SSH; 37 are WMI.
Bill asked Fruition to confirm, and they did, that discovery data is processed at the instance server to generate discovery mappings. Jessica asked for a spec for the data format instances expect from MID servers, but they don't believe this is documented. James recommended we use existing code to determine what output was expected from probes.
James showed the Yale team a few standard probes; they were simple, and we believe these can be implemented as SNMP checks without significant effort.
Action items
- Bill will set up a meeting with our Service Now technical contacts. We want them to confirm that there is no technical barrier to our preferred approach, and we want their help developing an action plan converting SSH checks to SNMP.
Bill will set up a MID server against a sandbox instance of Service Now so we can begin testing Discovery and client hosts for testing.- Jessica will set up SNMP on the client hosts and write proof-of-concept snmp checks against them for network and process checking.
- Bill will send Jessica a login for the sandbox instance and give her root access to test clients.
- Bill, Jessica and Howard will schedule a presentation with the core Service Now implementation team for 2 meetings from now (Monday, Nov. 21). Our tentative plan is to to present an overview of the capabilities and limitations of discovery itself. By that point, we would like to have for ourselves: a working proof of concept for the 60% case (network+process checks) via SNMP, a catalog of the remaining probes we believe need to be written in SNMP to meet feature parity with SSH-driven solutions, and an estimate of the time required to complete that work.