108 | Refining Network Discovery
Network Discovery
You can l eave disco very s et up t hat w ay, if it is s atisf acto ry to y ou. In fact , if th ere
is a lot of change in your network, leaving it alone may be the best thing to do.
However, you can set discovery up more precisely. For instance, you may want
to reduce overhead on the network, or you may have a lot of community strings
for security reasons and want to set up separate ranges for them. You can pick
out IPv4 ranges or individual devices for Network Discovery to handle
differently.
Network Discovery allows you to set up a matrix of network discovery, analyzing
your network both geographically and functionally. For example, you might
arrange discovery for an IPv4 range in a particular building one way and single
out all the routers or servers across your network another way.
A tree of IPv4 ranges
Network Discovery actually works harder when it doesn’t find devices than
when it does, because it keeps trying. Once Network Discovery has been
running for a while, you may know that some ranges can be deleted or that they
need less than full active discovery.
On the other hand, you may decide you want even more information from
certain ranges. Perhaps you want to turn on resource management to have disk
and CPU information from servers, pages printed information from printers, or
battery levels from UPSs.
So far, you have Network Discovery set up to examine every device the same
way. If you want to look at some parts of the network or some individual devices
differently or not at all, add ranges that you want to have treated differently. You
can then apply Property Groups to the ranges.