IT Discovery Machine (ITDM)

As software life cycles churn through your data centers, you can depend on ITDM to find and map the underlying components. 

The challenge with most discovery tools in the CMS space is that you have to tell them what to discover. That seemed counter-intuitive to us. With ITDM, our heuristics discover and map software across systems and servers without any prior knowledge.

This removes the requirement of back-end databases containing software context, or catalogs with application configurations, or vendor-provided software signatures - prior to discovering and mapping your software. We can certainly leverage those supplemental stores to enhance, normalize, and transform data, but the originating context comes directly from the source.

ITDM has exceptionally low resource consumption during recurring discovery. The resource impact of the initial run is comparable to other industry tools, while it accounts for everything found. The real difference is in subsequent discovery cycles, when ITDM dynamic discovery only asks questions about new components found. This enables the complexity required for generalized discovery, while minimizing data center impact.

The benefits of discovery in large Configuration Management System (CMS/CMDB) deployments is fantastic. However, the operation and support of them is no small task. They require significant amounts of regular tuning and maintenance to perform properly.  Many of these discovery products require a dedicated discovery job per technology for which you want coverage. If you need coverage for 100 software applications, it might require 100 jobs.

While 1-to-1 jobs are necessary for detailed context, they shouldn’t be the standard or required method for normal coverage. ITDM employs generalized discovery for software components, which allows the replacement of most technology-specific jobs with a couple generalized discovery jobs. 

Proprietary discovery agents (common in the industry) installed on servers come with their share of complications: platform version dependencies, application compatibility, patch deployment and provisioning – to name a few. When only using agents, how do you find endpoints with an offline agent or servers that never had one?

ITDM’s dynamic discovery leverages available OS-level shell protocols. That’s SSH on Linux and Unix variants, PowerShell on the Windows variants, or PowerShell Core since it went open-source and OS-agnostic in 2017. The platform can leverage any agent-less option (e.g. SNMP, WMI, SQL), but the dynamic discovery jobs employ a remote shell.

IT Discovery Machine is our supported version of the Open Content Platform (OCP).  OCP is an open-source product released LGPL; learn more about it at opencontentplatform.org.