Discovery patterns used by ITOM Visibility

Release version: Australia

Updated March 12, 2026

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Summary of Discovery patterns used by ITOM Visibility

Discovery patterns in ServiceNow ITOM Visibility enable automated identification and mapping of configuration items (CIs) such as network devices and applications within your environment. These patterns consist of command sequences that detect CI attributes and their connections. Both Service Mapping and Discovery utilize these patterns to build CI inventories and service maps, supporting infrastructure and application types. Patterns support top-down (Service Mapping) and horizontal (Discovery) discovery processes, facilitating comprehensive visibility and management of your IT services.

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Key Features

Pattern Types and Usage: Infrastructure patterns generate device inventories used by Discovery, while application patterns support both Discovery and Service Mapping to identify applications and build service instance maps.
Customization: Patterns can be customized or newly created to discover proprietary or modified devices and applications. Customization creates a separate copy of the pattern, preserving the original for upgrade compatibility.
Pattern Storage and Management: All patterns are stored in the Discovery Patterns [sapattern] table. Patterns are linked to CI types and can have main and related CI types to enable detailed discovery.
Role-Based Access: Specific user roles such as Discovery admin and PD admin manage pattern creation, editing, and publishing. MID Server roles enable pattern execution during discovery operations.
Domain Support: Patterns can be global, applying to all domains, or domain-specific, allowing targeted discovery in domain-separated environments.
Pattern Lifecycle: Develop and test patterns in a development instance before deploying to production via update sets. Multiple pattern versions can be managed, enabling easy reversion or updates.
Extensive Pattern Libraries: ITOM Visibility includes a broad set of on-premise and cloud discovery patterns supporting major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP, IBM, OCI).
Enhancements and Extensions: Patterns can be enhanced with shared libraries for additional attributes, traffic-based discovery can refine patterns, and Oracle Wallet authentication supports secure database discovery.
Performance Improvements: Features like direct field population in CI tables and server CI population during cloud discovery reduce discovery time and improve query efficiency.

What This Enables You to Do

Automatically inventory and map devices and applications across your IT infrastructure and cloud environments.
Customize discovery to fit proprietary or unique organizational technologies, ensuring accurate CMDB population.
Leverage role-based controls to securely manage discovery patterns and their deployment.
Support domain-separated environments with flexible pattern assignment, enhancing governance and data segregation.
Maintain pattern consistency and upgrades through version management and controlled promotion from development to production.
Improve discovery speed and accuracy with ongoing updates from the ServiceNow Store and advanced pattern features.

Next Steps for ServiceNow Customers

Install or update the Discovery and Service Mapping Patterns applications to access the latest industry-standard patterns.
Create or customize CI types and entry points for unsupported or proprietary applications and devices.
Develop and test new or modified patterns in non-production instances before deployment.
Assign appropriate user roles to ensure proper pattern management and execution.
Consider domain-specific pattern creation if using domain separation to tailor discovery scope.
Use update sets to migrate patterns and pattern-related configurations between instances reliably.
Monitor and leverage pattern enhancements, including traffic-based discovery and Oracle Wallet authentication, to optimize discovery outcomes.

Service Mapping and Discovery use patterns in their discovery process that cover most industry standard network devices and applications. You can customize these patterns and create new ones.

ServiceNow applications refer to devices and applications that comprise a service instance as configuration items (CIs).

What discovery patterns are

A pattern is a sequence of commands designed to detect attributes of a CI and its outbound connections. Service Mapping and Discovery share a set of preconfigured patterns that cover most of the commonly used devices and applications. Patterns can be of the infrastructure or application type. Infrastructure patterns are used only by Discovery for creating lists of devices. Application patterns serve both Service Mapping and Discovery, which use the same application patterns for their purposes. For example, Discovery runs the horizontal discovery with the Apache Web Server pattern to find and list all Apache Web Servers in your organization. Service Mapping runs the top-down discovery using the same pattern to discover a specific Apache Web Server and place it on a service instance map.

Note:

Currently, pattern operations do not support multi-languages. If values returned from pattern operations are not in English, the returned data cannot be parsed properly and the pattern discovery will fail.

Table 1. Pattern usage by Service Mapping and Discovery
Product	Pattern type	Result
Discovery	Infrastructure pattern	Inventory list of devices
Discovery	Application pattern	Inventory list of applications
Service Mapping	Application pattern	Service instance map

For discovering devices that act as hosts for applications, Service Mapping relies on Discovery. As part of the top-down discovery process, Service Mapping triggers Discovery to perform its horizontal discovery behind the scenes. Service Mapping then uses information on hosts provided by the horizontal discovery to create its service instance maps.

Patterns of all types are stored in the Discovery Patterns [sa_pattern] table.

Discovery uses a combination of probes and patterns. For more information, see Horizontal discovery process flow with probes and sensors.

Correlation between pattern and CI type

Patterns are assigned to the CI types that they serve to discover. If necessary, you can assign more than one CI type per pattern. In that case, you define one main CI type and multiple related CI types. For example, a pattern for discovering BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager (GTM) F5 has F5 BigIP GTM as its main CI type. It also has related CI types for the Domain Name System (DNS) name, network adapter, and other components.

For the top-down discovery performed by Service Mapping, each application pattern serves to discover only the main CI type.

During top-down discovery, a pattern discovers only the main CI type. — Figure 1. Main CI type discovery during top-down discovery

However, Service Mapping usually uses more than one pattern to discover the same CI type, because a CI type can use different protocols, operating systems, entry points, and so on.

Unlike top-down discovery, the process of horizontal discovery uses each pattern to discover a main CI type with all related CI types.

During horizontal discovery, a pattern discovers the main CI type and all related CI types. — Figure 2. Discovery of main and related CI types during horizontal discovery

Why install patterns from the ServiceNow Store

ServiceNow releases new discovery patterns on the ServiceNow Store on a monthly basis to ensure that your organization can discover the latest industry-standard devices and applications. Major ServiceNow versions incorporate patterns previously released on the ServiceNow Store.

ServiceNow releases all discovery patterns using the following applications:

Discovery and Service Mapping Patterns (sn_itom_pattern): This application provides the latest versions of discovery patterns the original version of which ServiceNow released on ServiceNow Store.
Visibility Content (sn_pattern_design): This application supplies the updated version of the patterns that were part of the family releases up until Tokyo.

You can install the latest available versions of the pattern applications from the ServiceNow Store. Alternatively, you can install these applications as plugins on your ServiceNow instance.

Why customize patterns

You can customize patterns in the following cases:

If your organization uses proprietary devices and applications, create patterns for these items to enable Discovery and Service Mapping to discover them.
If you modify key attributes of CI types that had corresponding patterns, modify the relevant patterns to reflect the change.

Pattern versions

When you customize a pattern, you actually create a copy of the original preconfigured pattern. While Service Mapping or Discovery use the customized version, the original version isn’t deleted. When you download an update of the pattern from the ServiceNow Store, the original pattern is updated, not the customized copy of it.

A customized copy of a pattern is not updated. — Figure 3. Exclusion of a customized pattern from an upgrade

If at some point you want to abandon the customized pattern and start using the updated original pattern, you can revert to the original pattern as described in Choose the pattern version.

Patterns users

The following user roles have access to patterns or pattern-related modules and can perform various actions. Note that customizing patterns requires basic knowledge of programming.

Table 2. Patterns users and access
User	Description
Discovery admin	Can view, create, edit, and publish patterns. The role enables users to run discovery, migrate probes or CAPI to patterns, and access discovery logs and dashboards.
PD user	Has read-only access to Discovery Pattern Log.
PD admin	Can view, create, edit, and publish patterns.
PDE viewer	Starting with Pattern Designer Enhancements version 3.9.0, users can view Command Validation Tasks, Command Validation Tasks Results, and Command List. The pde_viewer can view the Command Validation Tool modules and related tables, but doesn't have permissions to modify or edit them. The pde_viewer role can view the following tables only: Command List [pd_command_list] Command Validation Task [pd_command_validation] Command Validation Task Results [pd_command_validation_results] Pattern Shared Library Mapping [pd_pattern_to_shared_library_mapping] Temporary Variable Mappings [pd_temp_variable_value_mapping] For more information, see Discovery commands for probes and patterns.
PD MID	Not assigned to a user directly but to the MID Server record or the user under which the MID Server runs. The role enables the MID Server to interpret and run pattern-based probes.
MID Server	Can grant the MID Server access to the instance.

Patterns for instances using domain separation

In instances that use domain separation, patterns might be domain-specific, covering only the domains that you created them for, or global, applying to all domains.

Patterns belong to domains. By default, all preconfigured patterns are assigned to the global domain and apply to all domains of all levels.

You can create patterns for specific domains. In that case, the new pattern is used only for this domain and doesn’t exist in any other domains. If you customize an existing pattern in the global domain and assign it to a specific domain, you create a copy of the global pattern. The original global pattern is still used for all other domains except for the domain that has the customized version of this pattern. Likewise, if you customize the pattern belonging to the global domain, the change affects all domains except for the one that uses a customized copy of this pattern.

Patterns may be domain-specific or global. — Figure 4. Global or domain-specific patterns

Pattern creation or modification flow

Typically, you maintain two ServiceNow instances in your organization: for production and for development. Create or modify patterns, test them, and verify results in the development instance. When you are satisfied with the discovery results, export relevant patterns from the development instance to create an update set. Then you retrieve and commit the update set in your production instance.

If you’re creating a pattern for applications and devices that aren’t supported in the ITOM Visibility global content application, start from creating CI types for them.

Flow describing pattern creation and modification — Figure 5. Pattern creation flow