Assets Discovery

We've consolidated the documentation for Assets Discovery across Cloud and Data Center. This is the new home to find help with using and administering the Assets Discovery app.

Looking for Data Center Assets? Explore our Assets integrations documentation or Jira Service Management Data Center Assets documentation.


Assets Discovery is a network scanning tool that can be used with or without an Agent. It detects hardware and software that is connected to your local network, and extracts detailed information about each asset. You can then import this data into Assets in Jira Service Management to help you manage all of the devices and configuration items within your local network. Use this data to relate incidents, problems, or change requests and be in control of your IT operations.

Assets Discovery can be downloaded from the Atlassian Marketplace. This software package will run on Windows and Linux systems, and includes three separate tools:

  • Assets Discovery is an agent-less scanner to help you discover devices and configuration items in your local network.
  • Assets Discovery Agents are independent processes (agent-ful scanners) that can help you discover data from systems that are not always online, or collect data from Windows systems without opening the inbound WMI Port and the Dynamic DCOM Ports. Note that by default, Assets Discovery is an agent-less tool. This means that it's unable to gather information from systems that are not online or available at the time it scans your system.
  • Assets Discovery Collector is a tool that allows you to run multiple instances of Assets Discovery in parallel and integrate those results into one data set. You can also use the Collector to scan a network remotely and transfer the resulting data to a different location.

On this page:

Benefits of using Assets Discovery

Here's some unique aspects of Assets Discovery:

  • It's a network discovery solution that is integrated tightly with the Jira platform
  • It's the only solution that offers a real configuration management database (CMDB) in the Jira platform
  • It's the only solution that offers dependency mapping and impact analysis in Jira platform
  • It's the only solution that offers a rich automation framework focused on assets in Jira platform
  • Disruptive pricing - feel free to compare our solution with any other solution on the market, we think you will be pleasantly surprised

What does Assets Discovery look like?

The Assets Discovery application finds servers, computers and other devices connected to an enterprise's network. A discovered server or device is explored to capture the configuration, provisioning and current status. All the collected data is sent to the Assets CMDB in Jira Service Management.




How does Assets Discovery work?

 In general, Assets Discovery is configured to run a network scan periodically. It collects the scanned information in an XML file, then transfers the file into an import folder, where Assets can use it to import the data or directly to Assets Cloud.

  1. When a scan is initiated, the Discovery tool looks for scan settings to be executed and allocates memory objects to each IP address within the noted IP ranges.

  2. Discovery starts sending an ICMP ping to each of these IP addresses, noting the response or timeout, such as unreachable hosts.

  3. Discovery will then proceed to scan the reachable IP addresses along with all the forced IPs (if the ICMP echo on a host system is disabled) indicated in the scan setting with the modifier ~.

    1. If ICMP is disabled, each IP attempted will either allow login, reject login, or timeout. The scan will take longer to complete.

    2. If ICMP is enabled, it'll restrict login attempts and only scan responsive IPs.

  4. All responsive and forced host IPs will then be attempted to be logged in using saved AES-256 encrypted credentials.

    1. These credentials are stored in a file (credentialstore) and are encrypted by password and salted with system information, so you won’t be able to use that file on any other devices.

    2. While you can migrate the Discovery tool configuration file between different instances of Discovery, you cannot migrate credentials.

  5. If login is successful, patterns will be executed on the logged host or device, and the data discovered will be mapped to the memory object, and later to the scan results XML file.

    1. If the scan setting contains a large range of IPs in one scan setting, it might result in the Discovery host running out of memory. For instance, a /16 IP range will allocate memory for roughly 65K possible hosts, while /24 will allocate memory for only 254 hosts.

    2. We recommend that you start with one Discovery instance per network and a small set of IP ranges spread over the day. Then scale up the ranges until you reach the logical limits (such as time per day or memory). You need to test it to find out, as the actual limit will vary from one instance to another, depending on available resources, number of hosts to scan, or amount of scanned data.

  6. If the stored credentials used are not valid while attempting to connect to a host or device, Discovery will attempt to gather basic information from the ARC cache.

  7. Once all IP addresses are attempted and scanned, the scan results XML file will be zipped and transported according to the export configuration, where it will be picked up by the Assets Discovery Import app, a Discovery Collector, or uploaded into Assets Cloud.

Additional considerations:

  • The maximum number of threads that you can set in parallel running scan threads is 2 threads per core.
  • SSL protocol is used while transferring data between Discovery tool, Collector, and Assets Cloud.

Get started with Assets Discovery

Here are some pages to get you started: