ServiceNow Discovery: MID Server Properties
Introduction
Consider this scenario. ServiceNow Discovery has been configured and deployed to Prod. Things look good at first, after which you realize that you are facing intermittent issues with accuracy, completion and stability.
Soon, others start losing the faith in the ability of ServiceNow Discovery to work as expected. However, your worst fear is you yourself do not believe that ServiceNow Discovery will consistently give you what you are looking for.
At this point you have perused documentation, communities, sent logs to support and even questioned the credibility of ServiceNow Discovery and your ServiceNow Implementation Partner.
Finally, as a result of all the escalation, you (hopefully) meet your savior. Your savior doesn’t speak much… spends a few minutes on your instances and says ‘try it now and it will work’. And it does.
It’s a joyous moment, credibility is restored and the savior is simply a mythical figure that moves forward to the next battle.
This works out for a good movie plot! But what was the fix?
MID Server Properties
Yes, properties are the hidden gems in ServiceNow, which aren’t very obvious and are obscurely documented. Admittedly, they are also the ‘secret’ weapon in the QuickNexus arsenal that we deployed at times of distress… Till the point we realized that we can prevent the distress in the first place.
We looked at all the properties that we configured over numerous projects, filtered out the one-off exceptions and compiled the list below, that we feel confident to use across any ServiceNow Discovery Implementation.
Configure these properties and use Netflix instead, to satisfy your drama cravings.
Schindler's List…
These properties align with our recommended MID Server Architecture and MID Server Design.
thread.max
Set it to 100
mid.powershell.local_mid_service_credential_fallback
Set it to false
mid.ssh.use_snc
Set it to true
mid.eccq.max_payload_size
Set it to 30,000,000
mid.snmp.request.timeout
Set it to 15,000
mid.snmp.session.timeout
Set it to 15,000
Conclusion
Yes, we now configure these properties as a part of every implementation we do and we hope you will too!
This is obvious, but please test these properties in non-Prod before doing them in Prod. Don’t blindly trust strangers on the internet! Ha.
And keep this page handy… we will update this space if we come across any other universal MID Server Properties that should be configured everywhere.
To all the experts out there… Do you have any other properties that you would recommend for a ServiceNow Discovery Implementation? Do let us know via the comments below so we can all be our own saviors!
