NG CMDB Solution – Discovery

Discovery Overview

Automatic discovery is a powerful tool for the next generation of CMDB data management platform to accelerate data generation. Through automatic discovery, users can quickly discover and identify various resource instances in the IT environment, deeply collect the detailed configuration information of these resource instances, and automatically construct the graph relationships between resource instances.

For complex heterogeneous IT environment scenarios such as enterprise private clouds, public clouds, or hybrid clouds, the automatic discovery module of the next generation of CMDB data management platform provides a variety of technologies including TCP, UDP, ICMP, IGMP, EGP, Socket, Modbus, ICMP, HTTP, SSH, JDBC, ODBC, JMX, SNMP, REDFISH, IPMI, RESTFUL, WINRM, proxy collectors, etc. It can automatically scan and identify resource instance data of various types such as networks, security, servers, storage, virtualization, cloud environments, containers, middleware, databases, application services, configuration files, and computer room equipment. Based on the identified and collected resource instance data, the next generation of CMDB data management platform can intelligently determine the classification to which the resource items belong and the relationships between resource instances according to the classification.

Discovery Methods

Different from traditional CMDB products, the next generation of CMDB data management platform adopts the Agentless agentless collection mode in the automatic discovery module. Compared with the traditional Agent-based collection mode, the advantages of the Agentless agentless collection mode include:

Deployment Convenience

• No additional software installation required: In the Agentless mode, there is no need to install a special agent program on the target device or system being monitored. It can avoid troubles such as software compatibility issues and complex configuration processes caused by the installation of the agent. It can quickly start relevant tasks such as data collection, greatly saving deployment time and effort.

System Resource Occupancy

• Less resource consumption: Since there is no agent program running in the background, it will not additionally consume system resources such as CPU, memory, and storage of the target device. It has minimal impact on the performance of the target device and can ensure the efficient operation of the target device's core business functions. It is especially friendly to old devices with tight resources or key business systems with strict performance requirements.

Security and Stability

• Reduce security risks: There is no need to install an agent inside the target system, reducing the security risks of being attacked due to potential vulnerabilities in the agent program. It also avoids security risks introduced by improper agent software updates and maintenance, helping to ensure the overall security posture of the target system.

• Reduce failure points: There is no situation where tasks such as data collection are interrupted due to the crash of the agent program or conflicts with the target system. It improves the stability of the entire collection task operation and can more reliably obtain the required data information.

Platform Discovery Capabilities

Automatic Discovery with Multi-source Reconciliation

In the process of automatically discovering and collecting the configuration and graph information of resource instances, it is often the case that the complete data of a certain type of resource instance comes from multiple trusted data sources. Therefore, the next generation of CMDB data management platform provides the ability of multi-source reconciliation, which can integrate the resource instance information from multiple data sources at multiple levels such as type, instance, attribute, and relationship.

The ability of automatic discovery with multi-source reconciliation is a necessary skill for an enterprise-level CMDB platform. The benefits brought by this technology include but are not limited to:

• Effectively avoid duplicate data instances generated by multiple data sources
• Multiple data sources provide trusted information about resource instances from different dimensions. Through multi-source reconciliation, the trusted information can be effectively enriched and integrated
• Multi-source reconciliation combined with automatic annotation technology can realize automatic audit and verification of data across systems and data sources, improving the efficiency of data quality governance

Standard Automatic Discovery Tasks

The next generation of CMDB data management platform has built-in a large number of standard automatic discovery task scenarios to support the discovery and collection of multiple levels and three-dimensional aspects such as physical devices, infrastructure, software services, and application system components.

Here is a typical list of automatic discovery tasks for the next-generation CMDB data management platform: