HP SIM auto discovery

[JoeT_1]

We recently installed HP SIM to monitor various servers within our school. We did not want to pick up roque computers as we only want it to monitor servers.

As a result we disabled the autodiscovery feature. Upon returning this week, i find that the database base has grown considerably from the 4 computer we initially started with. It currently shows approx. 1800 computers, of which i have gone back to the DNS to determine if this computers exist and many are not even there. They seem to be ghost computers as i recognized a few of the names as being computers that are no longer on our network, and have not been for about 6months or more. Could anyone assist me as to how all this additional computers showed up if we have the auto discovery setting off and did not add this computers ourselves.

[fred Passeron]

Hi

There are many options in the discovery settingse even though the automatic discovery is disabled.
General Settings for All Discoveries

x Automatically discover a system when an event is received from it
x Automatically discover a server blade when its Integrated Lights Out management processor is identified
x Discover systems in an enclosure when Onboard Administrator is discovered
x Automatically discover HPVM guest(s) when the host is identified.

These options are valid for all discoveries. So if a server or a computer boots up and has snmp installed, the snmp protocol will broadcast when starting therefore your HP SIM server will recive a trap and try to discover it.
Regarding DNS entries, HP SIM discovery process relies a lot on the DNS resolution, so a computer may have several entries in the dns (Forward and reverse), as a result wrong entries are sometimes created in the HP SIM DB. So check your DNS servers, they may need some cleaning.


I would advise to check some others settings like filters, ip exclusion. Or disable also Automatically discover a system when an event is received from it.

hope it helps

Fred