OpManager: Network device discovery software for enterprise networks
OpManager's network device discovery tool comes packed with robust features aimed at making the device discovery process simpler, less time-consuming, and much more effective. These features include:
Device Discovery: Simplify the process of network device discovery and extend it to a wide range of network devices with the help of device discovery.
Discovery Schedule: Automate network device discovery by scheduling it. Avoid repetitive, manual efforts and add or remove devices on a regular cycle.
Discovery Reports: Gain powerful insights about your network in the form of detailed reports emailed right to you. Schedule these reports to be generated after almost any discovery function is performed in OpManager.
Device Templates: Classify your device models automatically and precisely using a set of preconfigured templates. These device templates have predefined monitors and variable threshold settings to generate alerts when SLAs are violated.
Discovery Rule Engine: Accelerate the network device discovery process and automate all the post-discovery actions that require manual intervention, such as associating service monitors or plotting the device on maps.
OpManager also offers proactive network device monitoring that allows you to monitor network devices, thereby ensuring the seamless functioning of the network while minimizing downtime and outages.
End your network device discovery woes with Discovery Profile
Discovery Profile in OpManager is the one-stop solution for all your network device discovery needs. It allows you to discover an individual or a set of devices with only their name or IP address. You can add a variety of devices, like VMware, Hyper-V, UCS, and Xen servers as well as other storage devices like RAID drives, tape libraries, and Fibre Channel switches. OpManager's network device discovery maps devices, renders the logical network topology diagram (Layer2 map) of the devices, and their seed router, and also allows bulk discovery of devices via an IP range, CSV file, subnet, or through Active Directory (AD) discovery.
The new update in OpManager's device discovery also allows you to approve or ignore devices once they are discovered. Approved devices will be monitored, while ignored devices will be restricted even during rediscovery or scheduled discovery.
Interface Discovery: Effectively discover the interfaces associated with your network devices
The Interface Discovery feature in OpManager helps you quickly discover and monitor your network interfaces. Interfaces are automatically classified based on predefined interface templates bundled with the product. Currently, OpManager has around 300 interface templates (or interface types) that help successfully classify interface types and categories. Similar to device discovery, interfaces can be discovered in bulk by specifying a condition or rule. Bulk discovery of interfaces can be performed while adding the associated devices to OpManager (if the device is discovered via Add Device) or post-discovery. You can also:
Individually discover interfaces associated with network devices and monitor them effectively.
Generate reports and configure notifications for individual or a set of interfaces and analyze the performance if necessary.
Generate violation alerts with the help of predefined interface thresholds. By default, alerts will be raised when the interface is down or when the thresholds have been violated. You can also customize these thresholds according to your environment.
Continuously monitor the key metrics such as bandwidth, utilization, and errors/discard rate and troubleshoot the issues with your network interfaces.
Schedule interface rediscovery at regular intervals.
Discovery Profile: For a seamless network device discovery experience
Bulk device discovery: Need to discover multiple devices but hate typing them one by one? No worries! Just enter the start and end IP of a range of IP addresses and OpManager will discover network devices in that range. You can also choose to ignore certain devices in the specified IP range.
Discover various types of devices: OpManager's network discovery tool supports multiple authentication credentials, including SNMP v1, v2, and v3; WMI; SSH; and Telnet. This helps in the discovery of different types of network devices, such as Windows servers, VMware devices, Xen servers, and RAID storage devices. You can add more than one credential to a discovery profile to discover different types of devices in one go.
Discover interfaces: While configuring a discovery profile for an interface, you can configure OpManager to discover the interfaces associated with the respective device(s).
Discovery based on a subnet (CIDR): You can use either the v4 or v6 scheme to discover devices using CIDR.
Bulk discovery using CSV: Have the IP addresses or DNS names of devices that need to be discovered? Just add them to a CSV file (along with other optional device information) and upload it. OpManager will take care of the rest!
AD-based discovery: Discover the devices in your domain in one go. AD discovery allows you to import devices in your domain into OpManager and monitor them. This saves a substantial amount of time and also decreases the chance of overlooking devices in your network. This AD LAN discovery is automatically performed during product startup. OpManager immediately identifies the domain controller and discovers the devices associated with it. Once they’re discovered, you can approve or reject devices based on your preference.
Rediscover devices: If your server just went through a hardware upgrade (such as a change to its RAM, HDD, interface speed, or ifAlias), you need not remove it from the monitoring tool and add it again for the changes to be updated. OpManager's network device discovery allows you to rediscover a device and its associated interfaces when changes are made. This process automatically updates the device and interface properties without the need for reconfiguration.
Automate network device discovery using the Discovery Schedule
No more running to your network device discovery tool every time you add a device to your network— OpManager's Discovery Schedule has got it covered. Just create a discovery schedule, specify a time interval during which you want network device discovery to happen, and the discovery process will be automatically carried out in the specified frequency.
How Discovery Schedule simplifies network device discovery
Automated network device discovery: Create the schedule once and it will run automatically in the time interval specified. This comes in handy if devices are regularly added to your network.
Configure rediscovery rules: Configure the actions to be carried out when rediscovering a device. For example, while rediscovering a specific range, new devices may have been added to the network or existing devices may have been removed. You can configure OpManager to add, ignore, or delete those devices when found.
Use reports to gain deep insights after each network device discovery operation
OpManager's network device discovery tool is equipped with a powerful reporting feature that simplifies the tracking and analysis of your network and the corresponding device performance.
Specify an email address and OpManager will send a detailed report to that email after every discovery process. This report can also be viewed and downloaded from the product if necessary. Customize the format of the email for easy interpretation by including your custom subject line and message.
The report includes the total number of devices found in the specified range, the number of devices successfully discovered, the number of undiscovered devices, the status of all discovery schedules, and other important information that will help you drill down into the efficiency of the network device discovery process.
Create manual inventory reports from the Reports tab post-discovery.
Don't just discover devices. Make them monitor-ready!
Network device discovery in OpManager is not just about adding the new devices in your network to your network monitoring tool. OpManager's automated network discovery provides two compelling functionalities that elevate the purpose of your device discovery tool from just discovering devices to making them monitor-ready: Device Templates and the Discovery Rule Engine.
Automatically associate monitors with the pre-made configurations, device templates
OpManager's network device discovery comes with over 11,000 device templates. A device template is a set of predefined properties (such as sysOID, device type, vendor, a few preconfigured performance monitors, and thresholds) that helps you monitor the various metrics associated with a device.
On successful device discovery, OpManager's network discovery tool compares the device with the available device templates and associates one of them with the discovered device.
The device template also contains certain basic monitors, predefined threshold values for different parameters, and more. When a device is associated with a device template, the configurations required for monitoring, such as threshold values and monitors, are added to the device. You can allow OpManager to monitor the device with these settings, or you can edit these settings in the device template or via the device snapshot page.
You can create custom device templates or import a device template into OpManager using the Sync and Rediscover option.
Set discovery rules to automate post network device discovery activities
OpManager's network discovery tool comes equipped with a Discovery Rule Engine, which helps in further leveraging the power of automation in the device discovery process.
The Discovery Rule Engine automatically associates monitors and business views with a device during discovery if the discovered device satisfies a set of predefined conditions. This eliminates the need to manually associate the basic monitors with a device after discovery, saving time and effort.
Associate process monitors, service monitors, file or folder monitors, and URL monitors with devices.
Create your custom monitors and add them to devices during the device discovery process.
The power of the Discovery Rule Engine is not limited to merely assigning monitors based on certain conditions during discovery. It can also be used to associate a device with a business view (based on the business area) and a notification profile.
FAQs on Network device discovery
What is network device discovery?
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Network device discovery is the process of identifying and mapping devices and interfaces present within the network infrastructure such as routers, switches, hubs, firewalls, wireless access points, servers, virtual machines and more. Network discovery is the first step in network management and a key to successful monitoring solutions. The process not only involves discovering network devices but also collecting device information to create an extensive network inventory.
How does network device discovery work?
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Network device discovery works by utilizing common discovery protocols that help in locating and tracking the network devices. The three primary discovery protocols used in network discovery are: Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP), and ping.
SNMP: SNMP is an application-layer protocol that helps IT admins to collect and organize data about the network devices over LAN or WAN.
LLDP: LLDP is a vendor-neutral protocol that transmits device information to its direct neighbor, if the device is LLDP-enabled. These neighbors store this data on management information databases (MIBs) which can be further accessed by IT teams using SNMP.
Ping: Ping is a network administration software utility that network admin uses to test the reachability of devices on an Internet protocol network. The ping function works by sending Internet Control Message protocol (ICMP) queries to host and measuring the response time back to the destination device.
Why is network device discovery important?
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To discover valid devices: With the constant addition of devices to your network, network device discovery helps you ensure that each device has a valid IP address before adding them to the inventory. Because invalid IP addresses may be susceptible to unauthorized access or threats.
To keep ports in check: Open ports could yield security breaches. Network device discovery can help you map ports in your network and ensure that unused ports are closed thereby preventing the intruder from by-passing security systems.
To gain in-depth visibility: Through network device discovery, you can understand the exact network topology: what are the devices present, how they are connected to each other, and how they interact. This visibility helps you analyze the factors contributing to the overall network performance. Hence, in case of faults, it helps you easily identify the source of performance bottlenecks.
What is a network device discovery tool?
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As IT infrastructure evolves, the size of networks ranges from a minimum of a few hundred devices to thousands of devices interconnected with each other. This makes network management not only crucial but also a complex job that is easier said than done. Also, this allows network administrators to discover the devices in their network in one go, monitor business-specific metrics, and maintain a healthy network infrastructure.
What is the purpose of a network device discovery tool?
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Continuous monitoring and maintenance: A small network issue could result in millions of dollars' worth of business losses. It is important to continuously monitor the devices in your network by adding them to your monitoring tool’s inventory with the help of device discovery software.
Reduced repetitive and labor-intensive tasks: These days networks scale at an exponential rate each day. That makes it impossible to manually add every new device that is being installed in the network to your network device discovery software.
Updated network monitoring tool: On average, 1,000 changes are made to a typical enterprise network every year. This number could be even higher depending on the size of your business. Whenever changes are made to a network device (say, a new interface is added or an existing one is removed), those modifications must be reflected in your network monitoring tool to keep it updated. Given the size and scalability of modern networks, a device discovery tool helps in automating this process by rediscovering devices periodically or whenever a change is made.
Inventory management: A network device discovery tool can track the inventory of all infrastructure in your network and keep that list of devices updated in real time.
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