What are the capabilities of mainframe (zOS) Discovery?

[jimmillet]

I have 2 clients that are interested in mainframe (zOS) discovery. They both are migrating from IBM TADDM product, which provided rich mainframe CMDB data: Mainframe, LPAR, DB2, IMS, CICS, WebSphere, MQ. I see that SN uses "mainframe unix services" to discover mainframe. I am trying to find out what data is returned. The SN docs showed pretty light data collected. Does Discovery collect any data for DB2, IMS, CICS, WebSphere, or MQ on the mainframe? We will need to get this data for service mapping, as many of the client application services uses these mainframe middleware components.

Thanks,

Jim

[taarik_rahaman]

Hi Jim,

I asked this question to one of ServiceNow's ITOM Architects (I have a requirement of mapping DB2 on mainframe).  His response: 

"We barely discover an Ibm mainframe but that is only for Hardware discovery, we don’t collect any running processes to map any applications running on it".

I suspect that the complexity of the mainframe OS makes any standard operations very difficult.  I know this isn't helpful, but just giving you perhaps some more information.

Thanks,
Taarik.

[robertgeen]

So one thing I would tell you to look into is the Eview discovery for it. They have an agent that has been ported over to ServiceNow discovery that can be used to discover Zos. However it does have additional licensing but if it's of extreme value it might be worth looking at. It appears the Eview company got bought out but you may want to take a look at this.

https://www.syncsort.com/en/about/eview?utm_medium=Redirect-EView&utm_source=Direct-Traffic

[jimmillet]

Yes, I am aware of 3rd party tools that provide mainframe discovery (ie. eview/syncsort). I was thinking servicenow would see this space as an opportunity and provide the capability themselves.