23.1 enhancements and patches

Review the BMC Helix Discovery 23.1 (12.8) enhancements for features that will benefit your organization and to understand changes that might impact your users. 

BMC applies upgrades as described in the BMC Helix Upgrade policy . BMC applies upgrades and patches during Maintenance windows .

Deep discovery of VMware guest hosts by using vCenter APIs

Discover the guest hosts that are managed by vCenter, even if those hosts are not accessible from the appliance or from BMC Discovery Outpost that you are using. In version 23.1, you can enable VMware guest scanning for individual IP scans. For more information about configuring and discovering the VMWare guest hosts, see Discovering VMware guest hosts by using the vCenter API.

Disable cloud host detection for individual scans 

Earlier versions of BMC Helix Discovery, by default, attempted to detect the cloud platform on which a host is running. In version 23.1, you can disable cloud host detection for individual IP scans. This enhancement helps you avoid an unnecessary step when you scan hosts on a subnet that is not hosted in the cloud. And, in turn, reduces the time taken for such scans.

For more information, see How to disable cloud host detection.

A similar enhancement improves efficiency when you discover EC2 hosts by using SSM or hosts in GCP by using IAP. For discovery by using SSM and IAP, the target is known to be cloud-hosted, and the cloud provider is known. So, cloud detection is disabled and only the appropriate methods, AWS or GCP are used. In a normal host scan, cloud detection is used to determine whether the target is cloud-hosted and if so, to detect the cloud provider. 

Miscellaneous enhancements

This release contains the following miscellaneous enhancements:  

• When scanning endpoints, BMC Helix Discovery uses a series of methods to retrieve information from the target. Some of the methods used are not relevant to all targets. For example, when scanning a Linux host, the getServices  method is not required, as it is valid only for Windows hosts. In version 23.1, the method is skipped and DiscoveryAccess reports it as RequestSkipped. In the details field, the corresponding getServices  method shows, Only applies to Windows Hosts.
• The npcap tool used in the component of BMC Discovery Outpost has been upgraded to version 1.71.
• The external REST APIs are defined by using OpenAPI 3.0 rather than Swagger 2.0. 

• The default sensitive data filters have been improved for processes and files. However, the filters are only available in new instances of BMC Helix Discovery. For more information about how to update the filters, see Masking sensitive data.
• Installation of BMC Discovery Outpost is supported on a Windows Server Core platform. 

What else changed in this release