Shawn, Discovery is like doing a physical inventory of a store or warehouse. No matter how good your change process is, something will slip through. And that server down time issue is configurable in most discovery tools.
Rick Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry -----Original Message----- From: "Pierson, Shawn" <shawn.pier...@sug.com> Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2009 08:16:07 To: <arslist@ARSLIST.ORG> Subject: What purpose does a discovery tool serve? Good morning, This email was meant as more of a general discussion rather than me being obtuse and not really seeing any benefit to using a discovery tool to populate Asset Management. However, I've been discussing this with the CAB manager and I'd like to have a better argument than I do now in favor of using a discovery tool. The argument against a discovery tool is this: If your company follows a strict Change Management process, all changes, additions, deletions of CIs should be marked in that process. As a result, if you have a change request to dispose of a server, you should attach the CI to the change request and you should mark the CI with a status of "Disposed" before a discovery tool would be able to detect that it no longer shows up. The argument further states that using a discovery tool to update your BMC.ASSET dataset could result in other problems. For example, if a development server had a hardware failure and you shut it down for a week while you were waiting to have time to fix it, how would the discovery tool know that it will be coming back and not simply mark the CI as "Deleted" or some other status? Without the context of Change Management, the data the discovery tool feeds you is not that useful. My argument in favor of using a discovery tool is that we don't have a perfect world and changes will happen without people updating Asset Management, so it's better to keep the CMDB closer to reality that way. Also, we can use the reconciliation engine to only automatically process certain updates, and someone can manually fix other records that we can't tell the system what to do with (e.g. the development server example in the previous paragraph.) However, I'm starting to warm up to the other argument, because I can see using discovery tools as an excuse to not update Asset Management and makes the relationship between Change Management and Asset management a little less useful. What are your opinions? Thanks, Shawn Pierson Remedy Developer | Southern Union Private and confidential as detailed here: http://www.sug.com/disclaimers/default.htm#Mail . If you cannot access the link, please e-mail sender. _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org Platinum Sponsor: RMI Solutions ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are"
