Using the Guided Network Discovery Flow

This chapter describes the guided Network Discovery flow, a step-by-step process for creating and running a Network Discovery Job in a structured, guided manner. A Network Discovery Job scans your network using preferred protocols on scheduled intervals to keep your inventory up to date.

You can access the guided Network Discovery flow from the Network Discovery UI by clicking Create Discovery Job.

Note:

The guided Network Discovery flow is a separate process from the legacy SOA applications discovery process. You can use existing device zones, but Network Discovery does not reuse any other existing SOA discovery configurations, such as inclusion and exclusion profiles, access profiles, discovery jobs, and pollers. If you have already discovered devices using SOA applications or the legacy microservice flow, you must rediscover them to monitor them in NPM dashboards.

About the Network Discovery UI

You can use the Network Discovery UI to view previously created discovery jobs and to create new jobs.

To open the Network Discovery UI, from the main navigation menu, select Configuration, then Metrics, then NPM, and then Discovery Jobs.

Note:

To access this UI, you need to deploy the Web UI and Web API microservices. See Setting Up Microservices for NPM.

The interface includes the following key components:

Search and filters: Lets you search jobs by name, status, or zone. Use the filter chips to filter the job list (for example, by Created On, Discovered, Last Run, Name, Status, and Zone).
Create Discovery Job button: Opens the Create Discovery Job guided flow to create a new discovery job.
Jobs table: Lists previously created discovery jobs with each row representing one discovery job.

Jobs Table

The jobs table displays all the discovery jobs along with key details in the following columns:

Name: The job name.
ID: The unique identifier for the job.
Zone: The zone associated with the job.
Created On: The date and time the job was created.
Last Run: The date and time the job most recently ran.
Schedule: The configured schedule for the job. If no schedule is configured, this may be shown as -.
Discovered: The number of devices discovered by the job.
Status: The current state of the job such as Completed or In Progress.
Run: Runs the selected discovery job.
More actions (ellipsis menu): Actions available for the particular job, such as editing, cloning, or deleting depending on the availability.

Creating a Discovery Job

The guided Network Discovery window that opens up when you click Create Discovery Job contains a panel with the following tasks:

Add Discovery Details
Select Discovery Method
Define Network
Assign Profiles
Configure Schedule

Add Discovery Details

Provide a name and optional description for the discovery job you want to create. You also need to select the tenant and zone to associate with the job in this section.

Select Discovery Method

Choose the discovery methods you want to use to scan and identify devices.

The discovery methods are organized into the following levels:

Level 1 - Basic Reachability
- ICMP Availability: Uses ICMP ("ping") to check if devices are reachable.
- ICMP Performance: Uses ICMP to gather performance-related measurements.
Level 2 - Standard Protocols
- SNMP Availability: Uses SNMP to retrieve device information such as status, interfaces, and performance metrics.
- SNMP Performance: Uses SNMP to gather detailed performance-related data from devices.
Level 3 - API Based Integrations
- VMware: Uses VMware APIs to discover and retrieve information about virtual infrastructure.
- Cisco Meraki: Uses Cisco Meraki APIs to discover and monitor Meraki-managed environments.
- Aruba: Uses Aruba APIs to discover and monitor Aruba-managed environments.

Define Network

Specify the IP addresses you want to scan to discover devices. Select the IP address version and provide targets using IP ranges, subnets, or individual IPv4 addresses, and optionally list addresses to exclude from discovery.

Note:

You can only select IPv4 for the IP address version.

Assign Profiles

Assign the protocol-specific profiles required to authenticate to devices during discovery. A profile stores the connection and authentication details required to access targets during discovery.

Note:

You can only assign authentication profiles for discovery methods from Level 2 - Standard Protocols and Level 3 - API Based Integrations in the Select Discovery Method section.

Configure Schedule

Set when the discovery job runs, including the scheduling mode, start date, and time. You can also choose how to handle discovered devices for monitoring; either review and select devices to monitor or automatically monitor all results. Optionally, run the discovery job immediately after creating it.

Managing Discovered Devices

After a discovery job runs successfully, you can review the devices found by the latest successful scan and choose which devices to monitor from the Discovery Job Results page. To open the results for a discovery job, go to the Network Discovery UI and select the discovery job name from the jobs table. The results page shows the job name, status, zone, discovery method, run time, and run duration.

The Discovery Job Results page also contains Discovered and Under Monitoring tabs.

The Discovered tab lists all devices discovered by the discovery job. You can use the search field to search by device name, IP address, or device type. You can also filter results by values such as device type, discovery method, IP address, and last discovered time.

To start monitoring discovered devices, do one of the following:

Select one or more devices, and then click Monitor Selected.
Click Monitor All Discovered to monitor all devices returned by the discovery job.

The Under Monitoring tab lists discovered devices that have already been added to monitoring. Use this tab to verify which devices from the discovery results are currently being monitored.

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Network Performance Management Reporting Guide

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