Depending on how you seek to integrate it can be easy or simple. For example, if you have an external API or web service that you need to integrate with, it will be a little more challenging than having AIE read values from tables in databases.
For client PCs, we have LANDesk and pulling in the discovery data from there is pretty simple, with the only gotcha being that the data needs normalized before you can really use it. What I mean by that is that some applications (for example, Winzip) show up with different manufacturers and different versions that don't quite match. The CMDB provides you with a means to do this, but I did it via SQL so that people could use the data directly in LANDesk in addition to Remedy. On the server side, you care about completely different things, so it does make sense to use a different discovery tool. We already had one in house called ECM. I was able to pull data directly from the DB here as well, but it required a little more work and a lot more conditions in my SQL to make sure the data was clean. I just completed the ADDM class last week, and we are looking to implement that in the coming months. It looks pretty cool and if it can do what BMC says, it will help create a lot of the relationships in the CMDB, which is always the greatest weakness of any discovery tool I've seen. Finding what software is installed on a server is pretty trivial. Crawling web.xml files on a server to look for database information then matching that discovered application with its database and creating that relationship in the CMDB is a little more tricky. Another thing to consider is that you need to clearly define the requirements. BMC focuses extensively on the CMDB side in their marketing, but an important thing to consider is the Asset Management side. Yes, it's very useful to build that web of relationships for support personnel, but it's also vital for you to be able to tell what applications are installed on what machine, then tie that back to a software contract to know whether you are in compliance or not and even if you can stop paying maintenance on some applications and retire them. I would argue that from a corporate standpoint, Asset Management is tremendously more important than Configuration Management, so your best bet is to focus on tools that help your organization be aware of their install base and licensing. Thanks, Shawn Pierson Remedy Developer | Southern Union From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:arslist@ARSLIST.ORG] On Behalf Of Hale, Greg Sent: Friday, March 11, 2011 8:27 AM To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG Subject: Discovery Tools ** We are starting the process of looking at tools that can handle the Discovery of our Assets and integrating them into our CMDB. What discovery tools are others currently using? Pros? Cons? How was it integrating with BMC's Remedy CMDB? The few Discovery Tools I've seen want to license/charge by the CPU or Asset. Is that true for what others are currently using? Any details, insight, or information would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Greg Hale SiriusXM Enterprise Management Systems Principal Engineer ARS 7.1P5 Solaris 10 Oracle 10gR2 HelpDesk 6 Mid-Tier 7.5P7 IIS 6 Tomcat 5.5.28 _attend WWRUG11 www.wwrug.com ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are"_ Private and confidential as detailed here: http://www.sug.com/disclaimers/default.htm#Mail . If you cannot access the link, please e-mail sender. _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org attend wwrug11 www.wwrug.com ARSList: "Where the Answers Are"
