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Prioritize IECs

Introduction | Guidelines


 

Introduction

 

Discovery Admin ships with 100s of IECs out-of-the-box. 

In addition to these out-of-the-box IECs, Customers can create new IECs to: 


A subset of these IECs can be prioritized to Visualize Results and Generate Incidents.


It's common to have many IECs identified by Discovery Admin, thus requiring us to prioritize a subset of these IECs.


 

Guidelines

 

The following guidelines will help decide which IECs to iteratively prioritize: 

  1. Phase: IECs corresponding to the lowest phase of discovery should be addressed first. For example, start with the P0s (Phase 0), P1s (Phase 1), and P2s (Phase 2). 

  2. Lookup: IECs with LOOKUP in their name imply that there was a successful IP Address Lookup in the CMDB. Since the CI in the CMDB can provide additional context for the IP Address that is not being discovered, IECs with LOOKUP should be prioritized above IECs that do not contain LOOKUP.

  3. DNS Name: IP Addresses that fail ServiceNow Discovery, but return DNS Name can provide additional context for the IP Address that is not being discovered. Any IEC with NoDNS in its name should be of a lower priority than the corresponding IEC that returns a DNS Name.

  4. Leadership Support: Understanding the priority of the Leadership Team provides direct inputs into which IECs should be prioritized for remediation. This also enables the executive support needed to ensure the support teams closest to the infrastructure not being discovered have the availability to resolve issues identified by Discovery Admin.

  5. Support Teams: Independant of the Leadership Team, we often come across Support Teams who understand the importance of good data in the CMDB. Leveraging these existing relationships within the organization helps prioritize IECs aligned with these Support Teams. 

  6. Volume of Errors: When we look at the different IECs published, we see some IECs with a large number of corresponding errors and other IECs with a small number of corresponding errors. Prioritizing IECs with a large number of errors helps quickly reduce the total count of errors while prioritizing IECs with a lower number of errors helps quickly reduce the different types of IECs that need to be remediated. The choice of which to prioritize should be aligned with the internal goals.

  7. Type of IEC: The 2nd Segment of the IEC provides insights into the type of IEC. Based on the internal goals, certain types of IECs can be prioritized based on other inputs provided in this section. 

  8. Customer IECs - Eliminate Noise: IECs created by the Customer to eliminate noise result in other corresponding out-of-the-box or custom IECs to have more accurate results. As a result, these corresponding IECs should be prioritized for remediation. 

  9. Customer IECs - Increase Granularity: IECs created by the Customer to increase granularity provides a strong signal that these IECs are important. As a result, these IECs should be prioritized for remediation. 


Using the inputs above, we have every customer prioritize a different set of IECs aligned with internal requirements.

These guidelines iteratively improve the overall throughput of ServiceNow Discovery and the data quality of the CMDB.

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