1. #12: Discover and map your service assets
Success Pillar: Get your ServiceNow foundations right

2. Success Pillars – Structure
State and measure your business goals
Actively lead the transformation
Get your ServiceNow foundations right
Create excitement, drive adoption 1
State your transformation vision and outcomes 5
Engage executive sponsor to drive change and remove roadblocks 11
Manage to
“Out-of-the Box” 15
Design an engaging self-service employee & customer experience 2
Build your business case 6
Find, manage, and coordinate capable, certified partners 12
Discover and map your service assets 16
Design an optimal agent and rep experience 3
Build a phased
program plan, identify quick win 7
Build dedicated, dynamic governance process, policies & team 13
Plan your architecture, instances, integrations and data flows 17
Create change management plan 4
Baseline and track performance, usage KPIs and metrics 8
Reimagine how you want work processes to flow 14
Plan for upgrades at least once a year 18
Build internal team of ServiceNow experts & train users 9
Define and map out your business services 19
Build a community of champions 10
Manage platform demand

3. Discover and map your service assets
Achieving complete visibility into your enterprise infrastructure requires reliable configuration data for physical and virtual servers, computers, routers, switches, applications, cloud instances, and more. This means you need an updated configuration management database (CMDB) at all times. But visibility doesn’t stop there – you need a view into how these assets work together to keep your critical business services up-to-date.
Mapping services uses two related ServiceNow solutions: ServiceNow Discovery and Service Mapping. The level of visibility these solutions provide valuable planning and diagnostic assistance, helping you understand the impact to the business from asset moves and replacements, unplanned outages, and migration to the cloud. 
Insight: Discover and map your service assets
Mapping assets to services requires careful planning and collaboration across multiple infrastructure teams to be successful, both during the discovery phase as well as the mapping of the discovered CIs to services. To ensure maximum value from service mapping, the best customers::
Actively communicate with, coordinate with, and obtain buy-in from their infrastructure teams (server, network, storage, cloud, application).
Be clear with the infrastructure teams on how discovery and service mapping scanning will impact their systems. Leverage ServiceNow Professional Services or your qualified partner in this area.
Follow the service mapping process consistently: start, map, fix, review, and approve. Don’t take short-cuts.
Key Implementation Steps
Start
Improve
Optimize
1. Get ready to discover and map assets
2. Discover suggested services in bulk
3. Fix mapping errors
4. Review and refine service mapping
5. Activate service and operationalize

4. Step 1a: Define your goals and scope
Get started with your discovery project by establishing goals and defining the business outcomes you want to achieve. Focusing on the most important business outcomes first, define the scope of infrastructure and applications needed to deliver insight in your initial mapping efforts.
While you can leverage the bulk mapping approach in Service Mapping, you should still make smart decisions about narrowing down your focus to reduce the time to review and remediate any mapping errors.
Define business goals for discovery and service asset mapping
Focus on the most important business needs first. Communicate these business-related goals first and foremost when working with stakeholders such as service consumers and infrastructure groups. Example goals include:
Reducing service outages
Strengthening security strategies
Supporting a cloud-first or cloud migration strategy
Define the operational needs to support the business goals, such as:
Understanding how infrastructure is connected to applications
Monitoring changing cloud models and services
Discovering shadow IT
Define the scope of both infrastructure and services
Define service scope, considering:
On-premise vs. cloud services
Business units, service categories or service lines
Geography (e.g. domestic vs. international)
Define infrastructure scope
Get buy-in from your Infrastructure teams (server, network, cloud) for their assistance in defining the scope of infrastructure
Customers usually begin with on-premise servers, databases, network, and applications
Expanded infrastructure includes storage arrays, cloud infrastructure
Steps
1. Get ready to discover and map assets
2. Discover suggested services in bulk
3. Fix mapping errors
4. Review and refine service mapping
5. Activate service and operationalize

5. Step 1b: Define your core and extended team
You must also enlist the support of several stakeholder groups in your organization. The core team is responsible for setting up and configuring the solutions to support the goals defined for service mapping. However, that team must work closely with infrastructure teams to ensure both thorough horizontal discovery (an inventory that treats devices and applications as standalone, independent objects) as well as accurate top-down mapping (capturing dependencies based on connections between devices and applications).
Create your service mapping team
Create a core team that is responsible for project governance and ServiceNow configuration. Include:
Project sponsor - Responsible to design strategy to align business issues with ServiceNow solutions. Enforces overall governance and alignment with business issues.
Project manager - Expertise in planning, managing, and delivering software releases
ServiceNow Platform owner - Senior leader who leads the decision making for the platform with expertise in governance, business and platform strategy
ServiceNow System Administrator - Assures stability and performance of ServiceNow platform with expertise in application maintenance, user management and support incident management, along with strong technical abilities
Service Mapping Administrator - Sets up the Service Mapping application. Maps, fixes, and maintains application services. Also performs advanced configuration and customization of the product.
ServiceNow Service owner - Accountable for the full lifecycle of their assigned service(s)to ensure they are providing value to the organization
Identify key “as-needed” stakeholders, such as:
Server group – Make sure they understand how ServiceNow Discovery accesses servers and finds software running on them.
Security group – Expect them to dictate where credentials are stored and to provide role-based access to maintain patterns. You need to inform them of MID Server locations on the network.
Network group – Make them aware of the network traffic impacts of discovery patterns and probes. Consult them to learn more about network zones, firewalls, switches, and other devices delivering core business services.
Application owners – Communicate that automated discovery requires support from teams that own applications. Let them know that the application owner must remediate issues arising as a result of discovery.
Configuration management team/CMDB administrator – Align with your configuration management team if it’s different than your discovery team. See Plan your successful CMDB deployment to identify their roles and responsibilities. They approve changes to CMDB.
Steps
1. Get ready to discover and map assets
2. Discover suggested services in bulk
3. Fix mapping errors
4. Review and refine service mapping
5. Activate service and operationalize

6. Step 1c: Plan your implementation
Before you can create a single service map, you have to get your Discovery and Service Mapping environments up and running. Careful planning of your technical configuration will get you started on the right foot, enabling thorough discovery of your services and assets while minimizing negative impacts to your operational infrastructure.
Configure and deploy Management, Identification and Discovery (MID) Servers
Size your Discovery deployment based on number of targets, geographic split and number of security zones and firewalls
Use the MID Server Planning Checklist to calculate the number of MID servers and probes needed for your environment
Leverage MID Server clusters, which enable multiple MID Servers with the appropriate capabilities to be grouped together for load balancing and fail-over protection
Minimize impacts to network traffic and operational devices
Place your MID Servers close to the targets that you plan to discover
When utilizing multiple MID Servers, keep them on their own dedicated virtual hosts within each environment
Increase the number of threads in the MID Server if you need more patterns and probes
Increase the memory from 1024 MB to a level appropriate for your environment. This allows the MID Server to allocate itself more memory resources from the host.
Open the required firewall ports from the MID Server to the target devices.
Monitor the MID Servers to stay ahead of performance issues
For optimal MID Server performance, keep host utilization at 80%. If you exceed 80% host utilization, your discovery schedules might not complete within your desired timeframe.
Practitioner Insight: Refer to the Populate and maintain your CMDB with ServiceNow Discovery best practice guide for detailed how-to guidance to set up ServiceNow Discovery.
Steps
1. Get ready to discover and map assets
2. Discover suggested services in bulk
3. Fix mapping errors
4. Review and refine service mapping
5. Activate service and operationalize

7. Step 1c: Plan your implementation, continued
Configure credentials
Develop an effective credentials management strategy. Use one of the following options for proven results:
Use the internal encrypted table stored in the ServiceNow instance. With this strategy, it’s easier for you to keep a credential table updated when there’s a change in device credentials.
Use the local security vault that you’re already using. ServiceNow has OOTB integration with CyberArk. Consult your security team for other credentials management vaults. You can easily integrate these vaults with ServiceNow Discovery. Read the product documentation about using CyberArk for your credentials storage.
Understand common protocols used by Discovery and the necessary credential(s)/access needed
Speed up Discovery performance using good credential ordering
Grant access to all MID Servers to the entire credential table
If the table contains 150 SSH credentials and five of those can access 90% of your devices, configure those five with low order numbers, which places them at the top of the execution list. Discovery works faster when trying these common credentials first.
Avoid lockdowns by placing credentials with strict log-in security at the top of the list. (e.g. access to Solaris system locks after 3 failed attempts.
Practitioner Insight: Align your credentials strategy with network and security teams to avoid project delays.
Steps
1. Get ready to discover and map assets
2. Discover suggested services in bulk
3. Fix mapping errors
4. Review and refine service mapping
5. Activate service and operationalize

8. Step 1c: Plan your implementation, continued
Plan the ServiceNow Discovery deployment
Start with out-of-the-box patterns, probes, and built-in APIs, limiting customization except where needed
Get buy-in and input from stakeholders, including the server group, network group, security group and the CMDB team
Implement Discovery using six phases (see best practice guide link):
Architect Discovery
Pilot Discovery
Review results and remediate
Extend out-of-the-box patterns for your own applications and products
Move Discovery to production
Service relationship mapping
Practitioner Insight: 98% of customers are satisfied with the out-of-the-box (OOTB) capabilities of ServiceNow Discovery to support a large number of devices, applications, and services. For example, customers discover these OOTB elements to use without customization:
Both physical and virtual servers with over 20 attribute and related record types
Standard network devices including routers, switches, and load balancers
24 OOTB application profiles, including MS SQL, Oracle, and Tomcat
Software installed with MSI (Windows), pkgadd (Solaris), and RPM (Linux)
Application-to-application dependency mapping
Logical network-to-server IP relationships
Steps
1. Get ready to discover and map assets
2. Discover suggested services in bulk
3. Fix mapping errors
4. Review and refine service mapping
5. Activate service and operationalize

9. Step 1d: Populate the CMDB with CIs using Discovery
Achieving complete visibility into the enterprise infrastructure that supports your services requires reliable configuration data for physical and virtual servers, computers, routers, switches, applications, cloud instances, and more. This means you need an updated configuration management database (CMDB) at all times.
Read the Success Guide on “Populate and Maintain your CMDB with ServiceNow Discovery” to give you a great head start on how to use ServiceNow Discovery to create the configuration items that you’ll use to map out your services. Here are some key steps to get you on your way.
Run horizontal discovery of assets using ServiceNow Discovery
Monitor the number of duplicate records showing up in the CMDB, especially with data from different sources
Match all the CI classes being imported with those found with Discovery when reconciling discovery data from different sources
Review the Discovery identifiers to ensure a match between discovered and imported CI records
Steps
1. Get ready to discover and map assets
2. Discover suggested services in bulk
3. Fix mapping errors
4. Review and refine service mapping
5. Activate service and operationalize

10. Step 1d: Populate the CMDB with CIs using Discovery (continued)
Identify duplicate CI records and resolve them with your CMDB
Monitor the number of duplicate records showing up in the CMDB, especially with data from different sources
Match all the CI classes being imported with those found with Discovery when reconciling discovery data from different sources
Review the Discovery identifiers to ensure a match between discovered and imported CI records
Use the Discovery CI schedule manager to access all discovered devices, errors that might occur during discovery, and unidentified IP addresses
Create schedules that complete in finite time for both on- premises and cloud infrastructure.
Prioritize scans based on critical business service or geographic needs.
Use MID Server clusters and behaviors to optimize schedule performance.
Practitioner Insight: Behaviors are a great way to focus ServiceNow Discovery schedules on a small portion of the network. Using behaviors also limits the chance that you’ll populate the CMDB with CIs unnecessarily. The use of specific protocols lets you select the ports to scan in the initial phase of discovery.
For example, you can create a schedule to scan for network devices on Sunday afternoon using a specific IP address range. And for this range, you can exclude SNMP but keep all other protocols. Basically, you create a unique schedule that uses specific behavior to populate CIs in your CMDB.
Steps
1. Get ready to discover and map assets
2. Discover suggested services in bulk
3. Fix mapping errors
4. Review and refine service mapping
5. Activate service and operationalize

11. Step 1e: Enable optional mapping technologies
Enable advanced Discovery features to prepare for Service Mapping
Enable enhanced application dependency mapping (ADM)
Application Dependency Mapping (ADM) discovers CI relationships by detecting TCP connections between devices
Service Mapping uses ADM probes for traffic-based discovery
When ADM discovery is enabled, Discovery always runs the ADM probes during the exploration stage to find the TCP traffic on your network.
Using these TCP connections, Discovery can find additional CIs and create relationships between them.
For additional configuration information, refer to the Application Dependency Mapping (ADM) for Discovery page on the ServiceNow documentation site.
Enable Cloud discovery in ServiceNow Discovery
If your services include cloud components, either cloud resources or cloud applications, Discovery will find these elements and populate the CIs into the CMDB
Cloud discovery offers two types of discovery
Service account cloud discovery - finds all resources in an AWS or Azure service account, including all datacenters in the account
Cloud application discovery - finds only the cloud resources in a service account for a pattern that you specify. Before you run cloud application discovery, you should have an understanding of how patterns work. See Pattern customization in the ServiceNow documentation site for more information.
Steps
1. Get ready to discover and map assets
2. Discover suggested services in bulk
3. Fix mapping errors
4. Review and refine service mapping
5. Activate service and operationalize

12. Step 1f: Set up Service Mapping
Setting up Service Mapping is the first stage in the Service Mapping workflow. It’s imperative to perform these tasks in the order presented below.
For additional details on each step, refer to the Service Mapping setup section of the ServiceNow documentation site,
Set up Service Mapping
Request Service Mapping.
Install and configure MID Server. MID Servers, which are located in the enterprise private network, facilitate communication between servers on the network and some ServiceNow applications, such as Service Mapping, and Discovery. For more information, see MID Server configuration for Service Mapping.
Verify that Discovery is set up and runs horizontal discovery as expected.
Configure credentials required for host discovery.
Configure credentials required for Service Mapping to access applications inside your organization private network. See Prerequisites for performing top-down discovery using Service Mapping.
Steps
1. Get ready to discover and map assets
2. Discover suggested services in bulk
3. Fix mapping errors
4. Review and refine service mapping
5. Activate service and operationalize

13. Step 1f: Set up Service Mapping, continued
Setting up Service Mapping is the first stage in the Service Mapping workflow. It’s imperative to perform these tasks in the order presented below.
For additional details on each step, refer to the Service Mapping setup section of the ServiceNow documentation site,
Grant roles to users and verify setup
Grant the following Service Mapping roles to relevant users:
sm_admin – Sets up the Service Mapping application. Maps, fixes, and maintains business services. Also performs advanced configuration and customization of the product. Assign this role to application administrators.
sm_user – Views business service maps to plan change or migration, as well as analyze the continuity and availability of services. Assign this role to application users.
sm_app_owner – Provides information necessary for successful mapping of a business service. Once a service is mapped, this user reviews the results and either approves it or suggests changes. Assign the sm_app_owner role to users who own business services and are familiar with the infrastructure and applications that make up the services.
Verify that Service Mapping is set up properly.
If your organization has a ServiceNow deployment with customized Discovery or CMDB attributes, perform additional configuration described in KB : Preparing customized ServiceNow deployments to work with Service Mapping
Steps
1. Get ready to discover and map assets
2. Discover suggested services in bulk
3. Fix mapping errors
4. Review and refine service mapping
5. Activate service and operationalize

14. Step 2: Discover or create business services
Once you have discovered individual CIs by class (horizontal discovery), you must now create services and the connections to their CIs using Service Mapping. Service Mapping creates suggested business services by looking at the connections of discovered load balancers, known as the “entry point” for business services. Service Mapping automatically creates potential business services – called “candidates” – as soon as you complete the Service Mapping setup.
You can also create business services importing data in a CSV file, or even mapping services manually. However, many customers gain quicker, more accurate results by mapping in bulk and correcting errors in a systematic way.
Create business service candidates in bulk
Service Mapping automatically creates business service candidates upon completion of Service Mapping setup
Service Mapping extracts entries directly from load balancers on your network. Service Mapping converts load balancer entries into potential entry points.
Service Mapping checks that potential entry points created from traffic-based connections are unique and not in use by any existing business services to avoid duplication.
Service Mapping creates a business service candidate for each entry point.
Remove unwanted candidates from the “to be mapped” list
Focus on Production business services – filter out load balancers in sub-Production environments
It you want to map most of the candidate services, select individual candidates, click “Actions on selected rows” and click “Ignore selected.”
If you only want to create business services from a few candidates, select each candidate, click on “Actions on selected rows” and click “Discover selected.”
Practitioner Insight: You can further filter the list of candidates by selecting specific ones to include in or exclude from discovery. Mapping only selected candidates provides the following advantages:
Reduces the discovery time
Minimizes the number of potential irrelevant business services
Steps
1. Get ready to discover and map assets
2. Discover suggested services in bulk
3. Fix mapping errors
4. Review and refine service mapping
5. Activate service and operationalize

15. Step 2: Discover or create business services, continued
Create business services from a CSV file
This approach is useful if your organization has already performed cross-organization mapping and analysis and collected some information about planned business services
Prepare a CSV file for mapping your candidates
Import the Service Map list
Navigate to Service Mapping – Home
Click Additional options under the Map tile
Click Import. The imported business service candidates are added to the list of candidates.
Check that the overall number of service candidates on the Map tile increased by the expected number.
Click Map to create business services from the candidates you imported from the CSV file.
Create a single business service manually
If bulk discovery missed some of your business services, you can create it manually
You must know the business service “entry point” and owner to accurately create and map the services
An entry point is the way clients access a business service. Usually, it is either a URL or a combination of the ID address and port. Service Mapping starts the mapping process from this point. For example, to map your electronic mailing business service, define an address as an entry point. Entry points vary depending on the nature of the business service. Service Mapping comes with a wide range of preconfigured entry point types that cover most commonly used applications
The business service owner is familiar with the infrastructure and applications making up the service. This user is your business service SME who provides information necessary for successful mapping of a business service. Once a service is mapped, this user reviews the results and either approves it or suggests changes.
Assign a Business Service Owner to each business service
Update the business service record with a Business Service Owner who will review the completed service map for accuracy and approve it
Steps
1. Get ready to discover and map assets
2. Discover suggested services in bulk
3. Fix mapping errors
4. Review and refine service mapping
5. Activate service and operationalize

16. Step 3: Fix bulk and individual service errors
While Service Mapping automates the creation and mapping of services, errors will occur as a result of the mapping process. Service Mapping groups these errors into different categories, such as credential errors, timeouts, and network errors.
The best way to address these errors is to tackle them one root cause at a time, starting with technical errors in the bulk mapping process. When you correct these errors in bulk, you’ll improve your accuracy much more efficiently than if you work on errors on a service-by-service basis.
Fix bulk errors one category at a time
Understand error categories
Configuration errors
Credential errors – incorrect Service Mapping credentials prevented discovery and/or mapping of a CI to a service
Consider a one-day “marathon” to tackle credential errors
Network errors
Uncategorized errors - If you have uncategorized errors, you can categorize them by business service
Review the errors on the Errors by Category page
Start with “high impact” error codes. The Errors by Category page organizes errors by high, medium, and low impact on the services.
For each impact category, errors are grouped into boxes by error code (possibly the root cause).
Assign errors to be researched and resolved
Coordinate with your infrastructure teams to confirm availability of resources to research and resolve errors
Create a ServiceNow Task to assign the error to a user in the ServiceNow instance
If the resource assigned to address the error is not on the ServiceNow instance, you can simply mark the errors as “Assigned” without creating a ServiceNow task. Then, add a comment to provide additional information.
Take an approach of “fix one, test all” – Select a single error to resolve first, then apply the same fix to the rest of the errors in the group
In Kingston and later versions, Service Mapping provides recommended error resolution instructions; start with these options if available
After assignees have corrected the errors, re-run Discovery
Steps
1. Get ready to discover and map assets
2. Discover suggested services in bulk
3. Fix mapping errors
4. Review and refine service mapping
5. Activate service and operationalize

17. Step 3: Fix bulk and individual service errors, continued
Once you’ve resolved most of the errors using bulk error handling techniques, you’ll turn your attention to correcting errors in individual service maps. This starts with prioritizing your business service maps based on criticality, environment (PROD, UAT, TEST, DEV), business unit, or other factors.
The goal here is to fix errors preventing a CI from being mapped or a map being created. You’ll review the accuracy of the maps in Step 4.
Fix errors in individual service maps
Navigate to Service Mapping > Services > Business Services.
Click View map next to the business service that you want to view.
Ensure that the map opens in Edit mode.
If the service map contain several errors, group them by error type
Refer to the Fix errors in individual service maps page on the ServiceNow documentation site for more information on common error messages and resolutions
Use the Business Service Map Dashboard to track progress of all business service maps in your organization, progress on error tasks, and other key metrics
Practitioner Insight: If you know what configuration items (CIs) and connections make up your business service, you can enable Service Mapping to continue discovery of the business service even if there are some errors. You can skip errors to troubleshoot later so you can complete mapping most of the business service, even if some CIs are missing.
Steps
1. Get ready to discover and map assets
2. Discover suggested services in bulk
3. Fix mapping errors
4. Review and refine service mapping
5. Activate service and operationalize

18. Step 4: Review and refine service maps
After the Service Mapping administrator maps business services and fixes errors in them, the administrator and the owner collaborate to review and approve the business service maps.
Users who perform review and approval have the roles of a Service Mapping administrator and a business service owner. The Service Mapping administrator is responsible for mapping, fixing, and maintaining business services. The business service owner is familiar with the infrastructure and applications making up the service. This user is your business service subject matter expert who provides information necessary for successful mapping of a business service. Once a service is mapped, this user reviews the results and either approves it or suggests changes.
Business Service Owner reviews business service maps and suggests corrections
Send individual business services for review. The system creates a service process task assigned to the business service owner and sends an notification about it.
The business service owner checks that the business service maps are complete and all major components comprising it are correctly represented. The business service owner checks for the following:
Verifies that there are no missing CI connections
Verifies that there are no CIs that do not belong in the business service
Checks that the connections between CIs are correct
Checks that clusters are reflected correctly
If necessary, the owner leaves comments, referred to as reject messages, on business service maps for the Service Mapping administrator to implement. The service process task assigned to the owner closes. The system sends an notification to the administrator that the owner posted comments.
Steps
1. Get ready to discover and map assets
2. Discover suggested services in bulk
3. Fix mapping errors
4. Review and refine service mapping
5. Activate service and operationalize

19. Step 4: Review and refine service maps, continued
After the Service Mapping administrator maps business services and fixes errors in them, the administrator and the owner collaborate to review and approve the business service maps.
Users who perform review and approval have the roles of a Service Mapping administrator and a business service owner. The Service Mapping administrator is responsible for mapping, fixing, and maintaining business services. The business service owner is familiar with the infrastructure and applications making up the service. This user is your business service SME who provides information necessary for successful mapping of a business service. Once a service is mapped, this user reviews the results and either approves it or suggests changes.
ServiceNow administrator refines business service maps
Receive and view notification from the service owner with refinement requests
Implement the suggested changes
Resend the business service maps to the business service owner for review. The system again creates a service process task assigned to the business service owner and sends an notification about it.
If the revised business service maps are satisfactory, the business service owner approves them. If not, the owner requests further fixes, which the administrator must address.
Steps
1. Get ready to discover and map assets
2. Discover suggested services in bulk
3. Fix mapping errors
4. Review and refine service mapping
5. Activate service and operationalize

20. Step 5a: Approve and activate the business service map
With a complete, approved business map, service owners have a powerful tool to support critical business capabilities. However, you can still improve service maps to enhance their effectiveness and reflect their importance.
Moreover, you’re ready to maintain and analyze service maps to support the key use cases that you identified in your initial goals – and beyond.
Enhance business mapping to improve discovery and control access
Define criticality for business services to reflect how important it is to your organization’s operations.
Enable traffic-based discovery for a business service
Using traffic-based discovery is like casting a finer net, allowing Service Mapping to find even those CIs that it failed to discover using patterns
Use this method judiciously. While the advantage to this method is that it discovers more CIs, at the same time this method may clutter a business service with irrelevant CIs
Create a discovery schedule for an application CI to find changes and updates. You can define how often Service Mapping runs the discovery process for different configuration items (CIs) and updates information about them.
Organize business services into groups to perform some actions simultaneously on multiple services.
Use service groups to control user access to services
In Event Management, you can track service health by service groups.
Steps
1. Get ready to discover and map assets
2. Discover suggested services in bulk
3. Fix mapping errors
4. Review and refine service mapping
5. Activate service and operationalize

21. Step 5b: Perform business service analysis using Service Mapping
Service Mapping creates maps to help you see the architecture and organization of business services. These maps are useful for planning change or migration, as well as analyzing the continuity and availability of services.
Clear dependency mapping provides the ability to guide effective incident and change management within a service. For information on connecting service mapping with IT service management, check out the best practice guide, “Automate incident and change management” on the Customer Success Center.
Plan the migration of an entire business service or its segments
Use the map to see which configuration items (CIs) need relocating or which CIs have become redundant.
Plan the upgrade or replacement of a CI
Check the map to see what other CIs are affected when the CI is non-operational during maintenance. You can assess and plan the downtime or make provisions to avoid the downtime.
Check the CIs using the Dependency Views application. Because the same CIs may be used for multiple business services, with this application, you can see all business services that a CI belongs to.
Analyze a business service for high availability and continuity
Use the map to identify CIs crucial for the service performance. Decide if you want to fortify these CIs by creating clusters.
Troubleshoot business services
Use the map to understand the impact of an issue and determine which CI is causing the problem.
Steps
1. Get ready to discover and map assets
2. Discover suggested services in bulk
3. Fix mapping errors
4. Review and refine service mapping
5. Activate service and operationalize

22. KPIs and Stakeholders Key Performance Indicators Essential KPIs
Percentage of CIs discovered
# service maps created
Mapping errors by type
Services identified with top-down discovery
‘Nice to Have’
Number of sub-production service maps
Production services approved
Production services in review
Stakeholder Map
Responsible/Accountable
Project sponsor/executive
Project manager
Configuration management team/CMDB administrator
ServiceNow platform owner
Service Mapping administrator
Consulted/Informed
Server group
Security group
Network group
Business and technical staff
Application owners

23. Appendix

24. Terms and definitions
MID Server – Each MID Server is a lightweight Java process that can run on a Linux, Unix, or Windows server. During discovery, the MID Server executes probes and patterns, and returns the results back to the instance for processing. It doesn’t retain any information.
Probes and sensors – Probes and sensors are scripts that collect data on the host, process it, and update the CMDB. Several probes and sensors are provided out of the box. You can also customize them or create your own.
Patterns – These are a series of operations that also collect data on a host, process it, and update the CMDB. Patterns differ from probes and sensors in that they are written in Neebula Discovery Language (NDL) rather than JavaScript. You use them during the last two phases of discovery. Discovery comes with default patterns out of the box, but you can customize them or create new ones using the pattern designer.

25. Service Mapping discovery lifecycle flow

26. Service Mapping flow by ServiceNow role
A typical Service Mapping workflow has the following stages:
The administrator performs basic obligatory configurations to set up Service Mapping.
The administrator maps organization business services in bulk. In addition, the administrator may map some business services individually.
The administrator fixes business service errors in bulk.
The administrator reviews the results of the initial mapping and fixes errors in individual business services.
The administrator sends fixed business services to the business service owner for review.
The business service owner checks that the business service maps are complete and all major components comprising it are correctly represented. If necessary, the owner leaves comments, referred to as reject messages, on business service maps for the Service Mapping administrator to implement. See Review business service maps.
The administrator fine-tunes business service maps with feedback from the business service owner, and then resends them to the owner for review.
If the revised business service maps are satisfactory, the business service owner approves them. If not, the owner requests further fixes, which the administrator must address. See Review business service maps.
The administrator completes defining the business services by configuring access to them, as well as some advanced attributes like criticality.
After business service definition is complete, the Service Mapping user can view business service maps.