Service Foundations’ Network Lifecycle Management module provides exhaustive network discovery, layer 3 discovery, and automated subnet management.

Exhaustive network discovery automatically identifies all of your organization’s (private) IP subnets to ensure that your Discovery Administrators are aware of the entire network topology.

Layer 3 discovery clearly identifies the subnets to which your devices are connected as well as which network switches/routers enable each of the subnets. This information can be vitally important in identifying risks and impacts in your environment.

Automated subnet management identifies and retires the subnets and relationships which have been removed by your network administrators within hours of the actual event.

Service Foundations’ Schedule Management module allows Discovery Administrators to easily manage Discovery Schedules.

When a new subnet is added to your network, a new schedule is automatically created for the Discovery Administrator to enable. Schedules for subnets that have been removed are automatically disabled and flagged for investigation.

As additional schedules are added to your environment there is a constant need to balance the timing of the schedules to balance the load. Service Foundations’ Schedule Management module automatically adjusts the schedules so Discovery Administrators can focus on more important tasks.

Service Foundations’ IP Tracking & Troubleshooting module is used on a daily basis by Discovery Administrators to help identify and correct issues with Configuration Items (CI) that are not being discovered correctly.

The module tracks discovery details on each of the active IP addresses within your environment and whether or not the IP is associated with a CI in the CMDB. This knowledge helps drive where your Discovery Administrators should spend their Discovery/CMDB continual improvement efforts.

When used in conjunction with Service Foundations’ Management Reporting Module, IP Tracking & Troubleshooting allows you to produce a Service Foundations’ Discovery Completeness report to highlight the team’s improvement over time.

ServiceNow Discovery does a fantastic job of populating and updating your hardware in the CMDB but cannot tell you when a device has been retired. Service Foundations’ Hardware Lifecycle Management module addresses this need by providing the ability to manage what happens to a device that is no longer being discovered in your environment on a class-by-class basis.

A laptop that has not been discovered for two or three weeks is a completely different issue than a mission critical server that has been missing for a day or two. The Hardware Lifecycle Management module allows you to granularly define the period of time before a type of device is reported missing.

When used in conjunction with Service Foundations’ Incident Adapter, an Incident will be generated to the Discovery Administrators to investigate why the device has gone missing before retiring it from the CMDB.

The module also takes care of the cleanup of the CMDB once you determine the device has been retired: all relationships to other devices, applications, and services are removed while relationships to your tickets are preserved.

Service Foundations’ Environment Management module automatically sets the environment field of your hardware devices in order to differentiate non-production devices from production devices.

Whether your organization has a single naming convention or a plethora of conventions collected over the years, the Environment Management module allows you to have complete control in identifying and populating the correct environment value for each device.

Service Foundations’ Incident Adapter module automatically submits incident tickets related to the CMDB or Discovery directly to the CMDB/Discovery Administrators group for a much quicker resolution time.

The module quickly and easily integrates into any Incident process with all mandatory fields completed in order to ensure consistent, correct submission of incidents that follow your organization’s guidelines.

Manual Incidents can be created by users off of the CI forms or from a Service Catalog Item. Automated incidents are generated by absent CIs, discovery errors, and schedule errors.

Service Foundations’ flexible Management Reporting module comes with predefined Discovery/CMDB metrics and dashboards and is fully customizable to collect measures and report against any table in ServiceNow.

The module supports the simple definition and collection of multiple measures, metrics, and KPI’s important to your ITSM program.