Auto Discovery Best Practices

[Shorty_2]

Does anybody have any suggestions, or who can point me to some documentation, on auto discovery best practices. We are running Systems Insight Manager 5.0 with Update 2 - Linux (I am not the administrator of the box, but an administrator for another team) and when we try and setup discovery for the range of IP addresses we need discovered it says it is too many. It will still let you do it, but I would like to know more of what the impact is. I have it set the filter to only discover servers and those with Insight agents only. The actual admin of the box doesn't seem to know much about it and has a very narrow scope defined in the discovery.

[David Claypool]

Discovery filters actually kick in after the discovery and identification process.

Auto discovery is a very simple task--it takes a range of IP addresses and pings them, waiting for a reply.

If auto discovery finds a 'live one' then it kicks into an identification process to figure out and classify what it is.

Once that process is complete, the discovery filter is used to see if the settings allow adding the device that's been identified to be added to the database.

In other words, an auto discovery range of 192.168.1.1 -- 192.168.255.255 will attempt to ping 2^16 addresses regardless of the discovery filter that determines whether or not the discovered device is added to the database.