The ability to automatically discover network attached assets and build relationships between applications and infrastructure components fundamentally changes the way IT operates. Organizations want to move away from managing infrastructure silos to managing business services as the imperative is no longer driven to optimize technology but to optimize service availability and performance. Application users don't care about routing tables and WAN acceleration devices – they care if their application is up and running.

Service-now.com's Discovery automatically populates and maintains an accurate and up to date CMDB. It discovers all network attached configuration items that make up the IT infrastructure (OSI layers 2 through 7) and determines the logical and physical relationships between CI’s. Integrating Discovery to the CMDB and enabling improved change, incident and problem management processes reduces the mean time to repair for production services and improves the ability to make the sound business decisions.

Discovery empowers IT and the business with insight into the following:

Change tracking
Change management risk analysis
Unauthorized change detection
Incident management impact analysis based on a service 
Software asset management
Risk assessment

Discovery ensures that owners of key business services have complete information on the status of a business service including past, present and future impacts to availability.  Here are some of the many differentiators of Service-now.com Discovery: 

Integrated discovery, CMDB, and process (Incident, Change, Problem, Release)
Simple installation
Centrally administered
Eminently extensible
Just works out of the box (no heavy configuration to get initial discoveries)
Baseline, current and future (desired) states
Subscription priced