OpenText Universal Discovery and CMDB discovers, maps, and manages your IT configurations and can be deployed on-premises or via SaaS. Increase your IT visibility and reduce your IT service disruptions with robust discovery, service dependency mapping, and proactive impact analysis.

What's new in OpenText Universal Discovery and CMDB 24.4

This release further establishes the Universal CMDB (UCMDB) Web UI as the primary user interface for OpenText Universal Discovery and CMDB. The modeling studio is now fully capable with query, view, and report editing capabilities. Direct access to creating, updating, and deleting CIs is now available through the new CI Explorer. And details such as CI history and attribute editing is now fully supported. Discovery administrator’s time and effort will be optimized through the full implementation of Remote Probe Management, providing a single user interface to view, download, and edit configuration files, with the ability to remotely restart the probe as required.

These and many other improvements to the capability, security, and functionality of OpenText Universal Discovery and CMDB are included in this 24.4 release.

Advanced Discovery of Networks

The Advanced Discovery of Networks for Universal Discovery (ADN) is an add-on to OpenText Universal Discovery and CMDB to provide deep network discovery far beyond what is possible with simple SNMP discovery.

Having detailed network device information and service delivery maps available to both network engineers and service desk means both can see and predict impact to business and IT services when changes are made to the network-- improving communication efforts between teams, user satisfaction with IT, as well as reduce service impacts for planned and unplanned changes.  

Advanced Discovery of Networks is built on OpenText Network Node Manager (NNM) discovery. ADN performs the same deep network discovery of Network Node Manager (NNM) but without any dependency on NNM itself. Universal Discovery and ADN can co-exist on the same data flow probe and work simultaneously with each other. Discovered results are pushed to the UCMDB Server application without any additional configurations required.

For details, see Advanced Discovery of Networks (ADN).

New capabilities and improvements with UCMDB Web UI

Modeling Studio views and reports

The UCMDB Web UI now has a full-featured modeling studio capable of creating, updating, deleting, and managing queries, views, and reports. All capabilities with the local client have now been migrated to the UCMDB Web UI. Additional operations are supported such as deleting folders and deleting files, refreshing, creating a new folder, moving a resource to a folder, assigning tenants, and previewing your results. Full hierarchical reporting functionality is available as well as managing any dependencies if you wish to delete a query or a view. (Idea 2812201, Idea 2837428, Idea 2869861).

For details, see Modeling Studio (UCMDB Web UI).

CI Explorer

A new module in UCMDB Web UI that provides the ability to view, create, update, and delete CIs, similar in function to the IT Universe, simplifying the management of CIs. You can access this module from the Main menu.

Create CIs – when accessing the CI Explorer, you can create new CIs of any type, along with the ability to populate any of its attributes. Identification properties are visible first to ensure the CI you are creating will be unique in your system.

Update CIs – Select a CI by searching for it or viewing a list of CIs within a given CI type, and then edit its attributes to adjust them to what you require.

Delete CIs – Display a collection of CIs based on a search result or by selecting a specific CI type, and then delete the CIs that are no longer needed within your CMDB. Multi-select is fully supported, allowing you to delete multiple CIs as required. Full verification prompting will help you not accidentally delete CIs that should remain in your CMDB.

For details, see CI Explorer.

Discovery

Improvements implemented with the Discovery module include the following:

Remote Probe Management

Being able to troubleshoot, manage, and restart probes remotely means configuring and fine-tuning your discovery probes is vastly easier and more efficient.

Viewing and Downloading Files and Folders - Full support for viewing and downloading files and folders (including logs) on connected probes via a single user interface in the UCMDB Web UI, by accessing the Probe Setup screen and right-clicking on any connected probe and selecting Go To Probe File System. (Idea 2879024)

Editing and Saving Changes to Files – A collection of files are available for editing based on an allowlist of file names. Edited files can then be saved, overwriting their previous contents. For a full list of editable configuration files and configuration settings, see Allow list of editable files and settings on a remote probe.

Restart Probe/Restart Probe and Probe DB – Windows and Linux-based "classic" probes can be restarted so that changes made to configuration files can be consumed by the probe upon its restart.

Note: The remote probe management capability requires that both UCMDB server and Data Flow Probe are on version 24.4 or later.

For more details, see Probe Setup page and Work with Probe Setup.

The 24.4 release of OpenText Universal Discovery and CMDB is a great step forward, making it stand ahead of much of the discovery and CMDB solutions in the market.  For a detailed explanation of all the improvements and advances made in his release, please check the detailed Release Notes.

Universal Discovery and CMDB 24.1 Release

In January, a new, containerized only release introduced improvements to the capability, security, and functionality of Universal Discovery and CMDB.

Administration and supportability

• Improvements to the REST APIs
  • The GET /topology API is now enhanced and exposed in Swagger UI.
• Purgeable CIs supported in deletion scenarios
  • When the Enhanced CI Lifecycle solution is enabled, if a deletion action is triggered in UCMDB for a CI that is in use in SMAX, instead of being deleted, the CI remains in UCMDB and its discovery state is updated to Purgeable.
• JMX access control under multi-customer mode
  • Added a new JMX method to the allowlist for multi-customer deployments which allow you to see the detailed versions of the Inventory Discovery Knowledge pack components installed in your tenant. 
• UI rebranding to align with OpenText styles
  • Restyled the About page to align with OpenText styles. 

Content Pack 24.1

Content Pack 24.1 has some great new enhancements and integrations and new platform support that will interest all Universal Discovery and CMDB customers.

As a note, Content Pack 24.1 can be installed with previous versions of Universal Discovery and CMDB, namely 24.3 and 2023.05 with required hotfix.  This content pack can also be installed with both classic and containerized versions of Universal Discovery and CMDB that were listed above.

New capabilities to the existing discoveries

This release introduces the following enhancements to the discoveries.

PowerApps discovery

• Added the capability to decide whether to discover attributes including the Power Apps canvas application's owner email address and owner type using a new parameter discoverPersonalInformation for the PowerApps Discovery job.
• Added the capability to use Admin cmdlets for the PowerApps Discovery job to discover more attributes on PowerApps Canvas Application, PowerApps Connection, PowerApps Connection, and Powerapps Environment.

Microsoft Azure AKS Cluster discovery

• Enhanced the Microsoft Azure AKS Cluster discovery to support Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) 1.24.x to 1.28.x (all the current versions of AKS available). (Idea 2875289)

VMware vRealize Operations discovery

• Enhanced the VMware vRealize Operations discovery to discover Network Interface Controllers (NICs), assigned ESXi server IPs, and their relationships. (Idea 2876352)
• Added to the VMware vROps Topology by WebServices job the capability to discover VM's inventory information for the designated OS types without the need for Universal Discovery Agent (UDA) or agent-less discovery: a new parameter reportVmInventoryForOS has been introduced to report Core number, CPU Vendor, CpuClockSpeed, CpuType, and OS-related attributes on Node. (Idea 2876355)

VMware Infrastructure discovery

• Added support to discover more attributes of VMs for the VMware vCenter Topology by VIM

New integration

This release introduces a new integration.

MS Intune Pull integration

• New integration Microsoft Intune Pull integration,which populates data about mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, as well as IP phones. (Idea 2874540)

Support for new platforms

Added UD Agent and scanner support for:

• ARM64/AArch64 Linux
• Mac OS 13
• Mac OS 14

Universal Discovery and CMDB 23.4 Release

And for those that missed reading about the latest release available for classic deployment here is quick recap of what is available in that release too.

Data Management, Visualization & Reporting

• Enrichment Manager in CMS UI with full support for Join/Calculated/Compound links in CMS UI
• Global Search makes it easier and faster to find the information you need
• Network scope management in Discovery UI
• Import/Export IP ranges in Discovery UI
• Show integration point log in CMS UI
• Show error message for integration job and query in CMS UI
• Link from discovery job to its adapter in CMS UI
• Remove automatic job dependency check in Discovery UI
• Search by "CI" on triggers table
• Show custom discovery jobs in CMS UI
• Deployment support for Containerized CMS on AWS
• Visualization of DCA compliance and vulnerability status in Modeling widget
• Capture of user login/logout audit events
• Export of all topology maps as SVG graphic file
• Documentation for discovery jobs will show any dependent jobs that are required prior to running the selected job.

SaaS Platform

• Download access to DFP and Local Client from CMS UI
• Access to JMX, API reference and Class Model via CMS UI
• Additional “self-service” JMX methods for license visibility, IP import/export and Discovery Statistics

Service and Dependency Mapping Discovery

• Oracle Cloud (OCI)
• ContainerD discovery
• Google Cloud discovery (GKE by Labels, Docker Image by Asset Inventory)
• Proxy server certificate trust for AWS and Azure discovery
• Improved installed software discovery on containers
• Replicate AWS, Azure and GCP Cloud Service content to ServiceNow

Software and Hardware Discovery and Integration

• Detailed JRE/JDK version detection by scanner
• Detailed Java application version detection by scanner
• Windows 11 ARM discovery
• N+1 probe support
• Oracle LMS improvements
• Blade server and enclosure relationships
• Faster replication between UCMDB instances
• Deploy sample data into SaaS via Package Manager