Azure management groups and subscriptions

An Azure management group contains other management groups and subscriptions. The management groups in an Azure Cloud environment form a hierarchy, but don’t contain volumes or virtual machines. Subscriptions contain cloud resources, such as virtual machines. The subscriptions that belong to management groups are called sub-accounts.

The advantages of using management groups are:

Easy population of sub-accounts

After you configure the management group and supply the necessary credentials, you can test the account. If the test succeeds, Discovery returns a list of subscriptions in that management group. From this list, you can choose one or more subscription sub-accounts to include in the Discovery schedule using the management group. For more information on the hierarchy of management groups and subscriptions, see Organize your resources with Azure management groups

Discovery of sub-account resources using dynamically acquired credentials

When you run Discovery on your subscriptions, you do not need separate credentials for each sub-account. Discovery finds the credentials for the management group and maps them to all of the subscription sub-accounts. The Cloud Discovery process handles credentials automatically by acquiring a temporary credential for each sub-account via an Azure API. You can elect to use the default configuration or customize the MID Server to assume other roles for additional controls and security. In addition, Discovery can automatically refresh the list of sub-accounts and datacenters covered in a discovery schedule. For more information, see the KB article Retrieve newer accounts/sub-accounts automatically via Cloud Discovery.

A service principal for Azure cloud services is similar to a Microsoft Windows service account that enables Windows processes to communicate with each other within an Active Directory domain.

To create the Azure service principal in your ServiceNow instance, copy the service principal credential values from the Azure portal into a text editor, and then transfer those values into the instance.

Verify the REST API Permissions

Download the Cloud Discovery patterns spreadsheet so you can grant user permissions required for running the Discovery patterns. In addition to permissions, the spreadsheet also includes useful information such as pattern names, types, CI Classes, and links to vendor documentation. New patterns are available quarterly, so check periodically to be sure you have the latest version of the spreadsheet.

Data collected by Service Mapping during top-down discovery

To include discovered components into application services, enable CI relationships used in tag-based discovery by Service Mapping. These CI relationships are available from the 1.0.68 release on the ServiceNow Store. For operational steps, see Tag-based discovery configuration.

Azure Cloud Discovery API list