IT Discovery is a complex yet fundamental capability that forms the foundation upon which many IT solutions are built. You can’t manage what you don’t know about.

The Challenges for IT Discovery

  • The fast pace of technology — You must keep up with all the new equipment that is constantly being installed. Not only do you need to discover it, you need to recognize it and what it is capable of.
  • The trend toward virtualization — It is no longer sufficient to know what physical devices you have. Increasingly virtual machine technology is a key component of IT organizations, big and small.
  • Software accounting — Now it is more important then ever to understand the software installed on your devices, not just for managing costs but also for managing license compliance.

Discovering and recognizing these physical and virtual machines, their host/virtual relationships and key configuration parameters, is critical to drive the business solutions that IT executives care about. For example, identifying the root cause of a network outage or the total cost of ownership of a business service requires an accurate understanding of your IT devices and the relationships between them. In the absence of that, as they say – garbage in, garbage out.

Optimizing software licensing costs and ensuring ongoing license compliance are major initiatives for many organizations. This again requires a strong IT discovery foundation as software licenses nowadays can depend on virtual configurations, the number of CPU cores, and even hyperthreading.

Configuration Management Database (CMDB)

The CMDB is the logical repository where the IT discovery information is stored along with other organizational data, both discoverable and non-discoverable, so organizations can correlate the data and gain a better understanding of the overall business. For example, organizations can tie information about IT devices discovered and organizational and financial information in the CMDB to compute a total cost of ownership for IT assets and business applications, which can then be charged back to the respective business units.

We work with the ServiceNow platform as well as HP UCMDB products to build a solution that works for you.

How Can RevealIT Help?

We understand IT Discovery, having been neck-deep in this for 20 years. In fact, members of our team have been key architects, developers and patent authors of the technology underpinning industry leading solutions being sold and used today.

We work closely with the Discovery module of ServiceNow as well as HP’s discovery solutions:

  • HP Universal Discovery (UD)
  • HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping Advanced (DDMA)
  • HP Discovery and Dependency Mapping Inventory (DDMI)

We can also help you integrate other discovery sources as part of your overall IT discovery solution. Typically organizations have multiple sources of data and we help aggregate and reconcile these various sources of data to build a more complete and accurate picture of the IT environment.

Some of the services we provide:

  • Environment assessment – recommendations to implement an effective IT discovery solution
  • Solution architecture and implementation
  • Incorporating ISO 19770-2 software tags for an effective software recognition strategy
  • Developing targeted recognition capabilities for specific software vendors/titles
  • Troubleshooting an existing implementation
  • Migration from older solutions to a currently supported version (e.g., DDMI to UD)
  • Custom reporting
  • Development of value-added solutions – augment a tool’s out-of-the-box functionality with custom solutions to meet your organization’s needs
  • On-going administration and maintenance of an implementation
  • End-user training