Discovering cloud services

With the information that BMC Discovery finds about your IT environment, you can make accurate, informed, data-driven decisions. Cloud scanning capabilities extend BMC Discovery's reach to create a dynamic, holistic view of data center infrastructure, cloud services, their relationships, and with additional host scans, provides details of what is running on the hosts.

BMC Discovery supports multi-cloud applications and services; that is, if your applications or services span clouds from more than one provider, they are discovered and linked correctly, tying all of the data together to provide a broad, coherent view into how multi-cloud environments enable the digital business. 

Related topic

Troubleshooting-cloud-discovery-failures

See this video (12:15) for a demonstration of discovered cloud services in BMC Discovery.

icon-play.png https://youtu.be/ITv8fxL0w3g

BMC Discovery can discover multi-cloud environments representing a majority of the most popular public and private cloud providers and services. BMC Discovery takes an agnostic approach to representing the multi-cloud assets and relationships. It can map assets and their dependencies to represent data center, public cloud, and private cloud environments. BMC performs this deep discovery in a cloud-friendly manner, leveraging APIs and agentless protocols. This allows for a holistic view of the entire IT environment, including hybrid application deployments. 

You discover your cloud services in much the same way as you would discover your on-premises infrastructure. You add a suitable credential, perform a discovery run, which may be snapshot or scheduled, and view the results. A significant difference is that cloud discovery uses the cloud vendor's API to extract data on your cloud services, rather than the direct access used in scanning your on-premises infrastructure. Connections to the cloud vendor's API are always over HTTPS to published endpoInts. An AWS scan returns information about EC2 Instances as VirtualMachine nodes but it cannot collect information about what is running on those EC2 Instances, as that information is not reported by the AWS API. To obtain details of what is running on those EC2 instances, you should also perform a "Host scan" of them.

The following diagram illustrates the cloud discovery process:

CloudPicture.png

Performing cloud discovery

BMC Discovery combines data from the cloud API with host level discovery data to provide rich dependency mapping of your cloud services.  

A "cloud scan" is similar to a normal scan, but instead of scanning a list of IPs, it connects to the API of the cloud provider and collects information directly.

To discover your cloud services, you must:

CloudDiscovery.png

For more information on adding a cloud scan, see Performing-a-discovery-run.

You can configure cloud services in the UI from the Administration > Cloud & API Providers option. For information on how cloud providers are added in product content as part of the normal monthly TKU update, see Adding-cloud-providers. 

In a consolidating system the results are consolidated, and if your system uses CMDB synchronization, they are synchronized accordingly.



Additional methods of cloud discovery

If you use AWS, you can discover EC2 hosts using AWS Systems Manager (SSM). This enables you to perform a detailed discovery of EC2 hosts running in AWS, without the requirement for a direct SSH connection. You are also not limited to hosts with a public IP address. For more information, see Discovering-EC2-hosts-by-using-AWS-Systems-Manager.

If you use Google Cloud Platform (GCP) you can perform a detailed discovery of Google Compute Engine hosts by using Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP) and Identity Access Management (IAM). This discovery process does not require a direct SSH connection. You are also not limited to hosts with a public IP address. For more information, see Discovering-hosts-in-GCP-by-using-IAP.