hello there everyone today is a very sunny day here in amsterdam but it is also a great day for news because yesterday service now came out with the announcement that agent-based discovery will finally be a thing after waiting for 10 years so come with us by the first video of a rm partners where we debunk and analyze everything you need to know it will be super fun [Music] now obviously agent-based discovery is huge news but before we discuss the actual solution we need to know just a little bit of backstory some of the challenges with the traditional discovery approach have always surrounded the security constraints more precisely allowing access and allowing credentials and this is especially true if you have sensitive parts of the network for example core banking infrastructure or dmzs and additionally if we're looking at the nature of devices especially now in a time of vpn and working from home people's computers and laptops meaning end points are not always available on the network to be discovered historically servicenow solved this with the help to help the script but now since the latest release in quebec this is now dead and outdated and it is being replaced by what we're going to discuss here today the solution of agent-based discovery so based on what service now have told us so far let's get down and analyze some of the conclusions so first of all like previously mentioned some of the challenges we discovered today is that obtaining real-time data is very difficult meaning that you have to wait for a discovery schedule to kick in and when you are in a troubleshooting scenario you want the latest data available furthermore taking direct action that requires additional tools and what that means is that in order to remediate things or in order to act on certain things you might need additional integrations or orchestration and other parts of the platform and last but not least accessing lots of data but getting few answers at this point we can only speculate at best does it for example mean that we will have the ability to communicate directly with the end users through perhaps pop-ups or does it mean that we can trigger custom scripts well that remains to be seen so the primary benefits with the new agentless approach are first of all you will be able to trigger discovery on demand for any type of hardware or computer that you use it on and secondly it tightly integrates with various processes such as incident or change management plus we can here additionally see software asset management and security operations and then finally of course everything around the agent-based approach is built on sensu which is an open source framework for monitoring and this is a modern tool where people can create their own types of scripts and queries from scratch now it gets interesting because this last part it opens up room for interpretation for that reason i have invited my good friend and colleague michelle welcome michelle hey nice to be here today in amsterdam i see the sun is coming out indeed welcome to the houseboat of arm partners glad to be here all right so clearly we have a lot to unpack here but one thing which hasn't really been addressed so far is the architectural setup um what's your view on it yeah well as far as i can tell servicenow is continuing to build on the acc framework as they are calling it but this has obviously also some implications so it's now briefly addressed in the video that mid servers are needed right yeah yeah and that's actually a very good point because especially if you're out to let's say discover you know end computers laptops and so forth it basically means if i understand this correctly at least that they need to be able to access the mid servers in order to push that data yeah i understand is also that the icc is not able to directly communicate with the servicenow instance of course i'm speculating but sure from from the architecture point of view for what what we were communicated it requires a mid server yeah so meaning that maybe in the mid server needs to also be available uh via vpn correct yeah exactly and speaking of that um i think it's rather interesting to also look closer at what data do we get because that is always the question like can we get the same data and for my understanding to a large extent yes we can because we do get the basic hardware information we get the running processes we got the tcp connections installed software uh what more do we have file systems right we obviously get exactly the same uh as we get from the agentless discovery right because uh to put it clear uh agent-based is not there to replace agentless it's more a complementary substitute uh specifically for environments where you cannot use agentless discovery yeah and i think that's an excellent point as well to add that it's not a replacement basically like you said um well with that being said i think it makes sense to have a little peek into the future of what this might actually bring us for me personally i am super excited about this and i don't know about you but for 10 years now i have heard like every time almost is there an alternative to the agentless approach what do you say yeah um we had to help the help desk it was always like a an agent but it was always missing this this uh uh i would say customize uh this means of customizing and and also the the data that was returned was way far less than the the agentless and and now the day is finally there that we can get the exact same value that we get out of the agent that's just agent based exactly exactly and you know yeah from a pure strategic perspective from servicenow i think this will be a game changer pretty much absolutely i mean it was the my opinion it was the right decision i've been just like you waiting for a long time for this and i suppose also that the community the greater community is waiting since a long time for such an age-based approach i mean if you go uh to the servicenow community there are actually question uh questions asking what will come after the help the help desk yeah and and it's it's also opening up uh then again the possibilities what can you do with it in the future exactly because you mentioned before you know some some small things like automation you know pushing software potentially yeah remediation exactly software packages i mean here we have a really stable foundation to build from pretty much absolutely and i'm i'm definitely looking forward to what service now will actually deliver yeah because let's be honest currently we are speculating sure so let's see what the future brings definitely i am equally looking forward to it so with the sun finally setting here in amsterdam we are coming to an end of this video but please don't forget to leave your comment on what you think the future will hold when it comes to the agent-based discovery and of course don't forget to subscribe see you next [Music] time