Getting started

The BMC Discovery content reference provides information about how BMC Discovery and BMC Helix Discovery discover individual products in your IT environment. The content reference is a knowledge repository of detailed technical information on patterns for BMC Discovery and BMC Helix Discovery. Patterns help identify products and product configurations that you install in your IT environment, and the cloud-based services that you use. BMC Helix Discovery’s pattern library contains over 650 patterns for leading software vendors, such as Oracle, SAP, and IBM. 

Each month, BMC provides updates known as Technology Knowledge Updates (TKUs) and Extended Data Packs (EDPs) to enhance the discovery capabilities of BMC Discovery and BMC Helix Discovery. BMC Discovery on-premises customers are strongly urged to apply the TKU updates each month to take advantage of the new capabilities. For SaaS customers, BMC applies the TKUs for BMC Helix Discovery as part of the regular SaaS updates.

The following table provides the current count of pages in the content reference, and the number of supported products and product configurations:

You can update the patterns installed in your environment either through the TKUs and EDPs released monthly by BMC or by writing your own custom patterns by using The Pattern Language (TPL).
All patterns are text-based, and you can easily modify a pattern to discover additional attributes, custom software, or uncommon SNMP devices.

Additionally, the BMC Discovery content reference provides you:

• An exhaustive list of cloud providers, network devices, printers, SNMP managed devices, storage systems, and load balancers that BMC Discovery can identify.
• Details of the monthly TKU release and the Operating System Upgrades (OSUs).
• Troubleshooting to address configuration issues, such as when discovered processes lack some command line arguments and patterns do not trigger.
• Examples of techniques for discovering and versioning that you might use in your own patterns.

Use the BMC Discovery content reference to:

• Be aware of current and future TKU releases.
• Understand how BMC Discovery discovers individual pieces of software, hardware and virtual infrastructure.
• Learn discovery TPL techniques from the current TPL patterns.

Content restricted to BMC customers

Some information on BMC Discovery content reference is accessible to BMC customers only. For a user to identify themselves as a BMC customer, we require them to be a registered community member and to enter their BMC Support ID. On restricted pages, BMC customers who fulfill the above criteria will see the full text of the page. Other users will see a limited version of the page.

Where to go from here

Use the information in the following table to navigate to the topic relevant to your goal.

Where to learn about using BMC Helix Discovery and BMC Discovery

The BMC Discovery content reference does not provide information about how to use the BMC Discovery and BMC Helix Discovery products. For information about how to use these products, see the appropriate versioned product documentation (available from the versions list at the top left of this page), or from here: 

• BMC Helix Discovery

• BMC Discovery 24.1 (13.2)
• BMC Discovery 23.1 (12.8) 
• BMC Discovery 22.2 (12.5) 
• BMC Discovery 22.1 (12.4)
• BMC Discovery 21.3 (12.3)
• BMC Discovery 21.05 (12.2)
• BMC Discovery 20.08 (12.1)
• BMC Discovery 20.02 (12.0)