Best practices for BMC Discovery

The following best practices provide information that you can use to secure BMC Discovery, increase its effectiveness, and improve your understanding of the overall system.

Overview

BMC Discovery automatically discovers the hardware and software in your data center, determines configuration and relationship data, and maps applications to the IT infrastructure. The following is not an exhaustive list of documentation to understand BMC Discovery in its entirety. However, it contains information that will improve your understanding of the overall BMC Discovery system.

Security

There are several actions you should take to ensure that your BMC Discovery is secure before you put it into production. The following documentation offers some common best practices that you should consider to keep your system secure and provides a brief overview of the security aspects of BMC Discovery. It is intended to provide network administrators with the information required to run BMC Discovery in their environment. It also provides the information required to enable security teams to verify that BMC Discovery is secure and does not compromise the security of their network.

Credentials

There are a number of actions you should consider when configuring and managing credentials in BMC Discovery.

Best practices with credentials

Planning

To ensure effective results, you are required to consider a number of factors while planning the implementation. For example, you must understand the system requirements, the way the system is used for scanning data, the hardware requirements for the BMC Discovery Outpost you install, licensing requirements, and so on. The following documentation is frequently used by customers while implementing BMC Discovery.

Installing

BMC Discovery is supplied as a virtual appliance and a kickstart DVD image. The following documentation guides you through a typical BMC Discovery installation process. It contains important information, such as the installation prerequisites, required appliance specification, post-installation tasks, and so on. These recommendations are important for a successful installation of the system. However, before installing BMC Discovery, you must refer to and understand the installation documentation.

Integrating

Integration of BMC Discovery with BMC CMDB, BMC PATROL, and Remedy Single Sign-On, is supported. Integration of BMC Discovery with these BMC products helps you keep your data up-to-date, use the BMC single sign-on and single sign-off mechanism, and automatically start a rescan when triggered by certain events. You can also perform integrations using the BMC Discovery REST API, CSV and XML APIs, and third party credential brokers. To understand how to integrate these products with BMC Discovery and what are the benefits of such integrations, see the following documentation.

Maintaining

To maintain and troubleshoot BMC Discovery, there are some common tasks that you may need to perform. The appliance baseline conditions are verified to get a health check of the system. In addition, some possible problems that you may encounter have been identified by BMC. The following documentation contains helpful information for maintaining and troubleshooting BMC Discovery.