23.3 enhancements and patches

If you are new to BMC Discovery, we recommend that you see Getting-started as an introduction to using the product.

Review the BMC Discovery 23.3 (13.0) enhancements for features that will benefit your organization and to understand changes that might impact your users. 

23.3.01 (13.0.01)

Model technical services and business applications by using blueprints

In a complex service model, it is necessary to differentiate business services from technical services and business applications. As a service designer, you can use blueprints to model technical services and business applications, in addition to business services, by using the Kind option. Also, you can convert an existing business service into a technical service or business application.

On the UI, the following icons represent each service kind: 

• Business Service
• Technical Service
• Business Application

For more information, see Modeling-services-by-using-blueprints.

23.3 (13.0)

Operating system upgrade

The BMC Discovery appliance runs on the Oracle Linux 9 operating system. Oracle Linux 9 is an up-to-date operating system with the following benefits:

• Contains OpenSSL 3.0 which supports TLS 1.3.
• Offers security, stability and performance improvements across the system.

Model services by using blueprint-based service modeling

The blueprint-based service modeling approach provides a simple way of achieving fine-grained control over the composition of the services that you are modeling.

Blueprints are predefined service templates or building blocks to be used by organizations for defining services when creating service models. Service blueprints visually map out the steps that make up a service process, and make it simpler to design a new service, or improve an existing service. The service blueprint plays a significant role in managing service operations, service design, and service positioning.

Service blueprints in BMC Discovery include nodes that can be defined to have static or dynamic rules. Each blueprint contains one or more nodes of the same kind, interconnected to define a relationship.

Based on your organization's need, you can define a blueprint to:

• Start with an application node, such as Namespace, and have the rest of the service contain one or more applications and infrastructure nodes to create an application to infrastructure map.
• Start with an infrastructure node, such as Host, and have the rest of the service contain one or more applications and infrastructure nodes to create an infrastructure to application map.

For example, you can create a service by using an existing service, and then add a new empty service.

Then to the new empty service, you can add dynamic content using a pre-defined blueprint.

Improvements in visualization and Start Anywhere Modeling

The visualizations provide a flexible way of focusing on the precise view of your data that you need. The following focuses are provided, with the ability to enable or disable categories within that focus:

• Software - Connected
• Software - Local
• Infrastructure
• IP Network
• All Directly Connected Nodes
• Application

Additionally, you can combine focuses, so for example, you can view Infrastructure combined with Software - Connected. 

You can also:

• Turn individual types of data on or off.
• Choose to see only incoming or only outgoing impacts.

The Directly Connected focus enables you to see all the relationships of any node, including imported graph data, and also see the provenance, that is, the discovered data used to infer the BMC Discovery model. For more information, see Software-and-infrastructure-visualization.

New and enhanced REST APIs

The following REST API improvements are available:

• New data/import/graph to import structured topology information.
  • It is easier to write patterns to construct the inferred model.
• In the topology/nodes endpoint, you can specify impact directions and multiple focuses.
• New topology/services provides concise information about services impacted by nodes.

Discover hosts with Windows Just Enough Administration

You can discover hosts by using PowerShell and Windows Just Enough Administration (JEA). Use JEA in BMC Discovery to discover Windows hosts, without providing full administrator level credentials. JEA is supported for the following credential types:

• PowerShell
• Active Directory Windows proxy

Send data to external consumers

BMC Discovery can send Directly Discovered Data (DDD) to an external consumer such as Apache Kafka, so that you can perform additional bespoke processing. Once the connection to Apache Kafka is configured, DDD from all scans, including that from appliances consolidating to the local appliance, is automatically sent to Kafka after the scan of the endpoint is completed.

Miscellaneous improvements

The following miscellaneous improvements are available:

• Custom reports provide the ability for you to create the exact reports that matter to you. You can:
  • Create, upload, download, and manage custom reports.
  • Place uploaded reports into Channels.
  • Download the standard reports definitions for inspiration.

• Set the default values for the Cloud Host Detection and VMWare Guest scanning options. You can also customize these values for each discovery run.

Change of supported OS for BMC Discovery Outpost

The minimum supported version of the OS for the BMC Discovery Outpost is Windows Server 2016. Before upgrading your BMC Discovery Outposts to BMC Discovery 23.3 (13.0), you must upgrade any BMC Discovery Outpost hosts to Windows Server 2016 and later. 

What else changed in this release