Advanced discovery in the SolarWinds Platform

  See this video: Managing Discovery Jobs and Performance. /archive/sw-videos.htm?uuid=gahephf3rz&title=Managing Discovery Jobs and Performance

At this point you have completed an initial discovery. Now you can add discoveries to include other segments of your IT environment.

Discovery jobs do not impact polling. Polling is prioritized first.

• Multiple jobs. SolarWinds recommends building as many discovery jobs as needed to scan your network. Initially, run the jobs immediately so you can see everything on your network, and then schedule the jobs to run periodically. Dividing the discovery into multiple jobs makes it easier to be selective about what to monitor, and decreases the amount of time each job runs. When you have a large environment, consider dividing discovery jobs by:

• Credentials - the more credentials you have, the longer it takes for the discovery job to complete. Place the most common credentials at the top of the list.
• IP address range - use a range that consists of fewer than 2,000 IP addresses. In a range, unresponsive IP addresses slow down discovery.
• Latency - run discoveries for remote offices separately so that you can adjust the timeout threshold.
• Polling engine - if you have multiple polling engines, configure a discovery for a specific polling engine.

• Discovery ranges. Although you can discover specific nodes, SolarWinds recommends using a range of IP addresses or subnets for a more complete picture of your network. None of the discovered elements count toward your license total or affect system performance until you begin monitoring. You can add multiple IP ranges or subnets to the same scan, but you cannot include IP ranges and subnets in the same scan.

  

• Discovery thresholds. If you run a discovery and nodes you expect to see are not found, you may need to adjust the timeout and retry thresholds. In an environment with high latency, the default values may not be high enough. Adjust these values after an initial scan. The higher the threshold value, the longer the discovery job takes to complete.

  

• Polling engine. If you have multiple polling engines, you will see an option to select a polling engine. The polling engine you select runs the discovery job and monitors your network. SolarWinds recommends that you limit a poller to 12,000 elements, so be careful not to overload one polling engine. If you have a large environment with significant differences in latency, position the polling engine close to the monitored objects.

  

• Schedule intervals. Schedule your discovery jobs to run periodically to identify new devices that were added to your network. Unless you work in a dynamic environment where new devices are frequently added to your network, SolarWinds recommends scheduling discovery daily. You can also select Advanced from the Frequency drop-down menu to create a custom frequency. The schedule interval you choose depends on how often you want to scan for changes to the network and the size and performance of your deployment.

  

• Scheduled results. A manual, scheduled discovery only finds network elements, but does not automatically start monitoring. You must select what you want the system to monitor. If the scheduled job locates nodes that you do not want to monitor, select those nodes and click Add to Ignore List. Ignoring hides elements from the results list the next time the discovery job runs.

  Scheduled discovery profiles should not use IP address ranges that include nodes using DHCP.

    See this video: Creating a Scheduled Discovery Job. /archive/sw-videos.htm?uuid=s4pz610zq5&title=Creating a Scheduled Discovery Job