ServiceNow is a cloud-based platform that helps organizations with a unified solution to streamline workflows, enhance customer experience, and drive innovation using AI and innovation. It enables purposeful orchestration and automation of tasks and processes across the enterprise and its ecosystems. It drives efficiency, optimization, and agility, regardless of an organization’s size or industry.
ServiceNow Discovery is an application/module within ServiceNow that allows an enterprise to determine the devices in its internal network or resources in its public cloud and also the applications that run on the cloud. It is also known as Infrastructure and Application Discovery. It finds computers and other devices connected to an enterprise's network. When Discovery finds a computer or device, it explores the device's configuration, provisioning, and current status and updates the CMDB accordingly. It discovers organizational IT infrastructure, creating an accurate and up-to-date record in the ServiceNow CMDB (Configuration Management Database). It discovers both physical and logical components, including virtual machines, servers, storage, databases, applications, and more. Discovery also creates all the relationships between computer systems (such as an application on one server that uses a database on another server).
MID Server (Management, Instrumentation and Discovery) is a Java application that runs as a Windows service or UNIX Daemon on a server on the enterprise network. The ServiceNow MID Server enables communication and data movement between the ServiceNow apps and enterprise servers and/or applications. It works behind the organizational firewall and is completely controlled by the organization. It initiates all communication within the ServiceNow instance. This communication is recorded as records in the MID Server ECC queue (External Communication Channel), which acts as a communication log between the MID Server and the ServiceNow instance. Jobs that the MID Server needs to perform are saved in this queue until the MID Server is ready to handle them.
The MID Server subscribes to messages published by the Asynchronous Message Bus (AMB), which notifies the MID Server about pending tasks in the ECC Queue. MID Server updates of the progress of the task(s) to the ECC Queue. It polls the ECC Queue on regular intervals (default being 40 seconds) regardless of AMB message activity. While MID Server facilitate communication, orchestration, and discovery, it does not store data themselves. Instead, they act as conduits, ensuring secure interactions between ServiceNow and your organization’s systems. It supports service mapping by identifying dependencies and relationships among services.
Below are few resources that provide details around the ServiceNow MID Server component.
- https://www.servicenow.com/what-is-servicenow.html
- https://www.servicenow.com/content/dam/servicenow-assets/public/en-us/doc-type/resource-center/data-sheet/ds-discovery.pdf
- https://www.servicenow.com/content/dam/servicenow-assets/public/en-us/doc-type/success/quick-answer/mid-server-basics.pdf
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Y7zULTiyAc
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