Data collected by Discovery
To discover hosts and devices, Assets Discovery uses the SSH, WMI, and SNMP protocols. All machines in your network that can communicate through any of these protocols should be discovered.
To assemble detailed information from a host or device, Discovery needs instructions on how to do it. These instructions are specified in Pattern customization. Discovery includes a number of default patterns, but you can also write custom patterns.
Assets discovered by each connection type
Every connection type will discovered different types of assets:
SSH | WMI | SNMP | VMware vSphere |
|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Windows® 95 |
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Platforms included in patterns
We've tested the patterns with the following platforms:
Linux/Unix | Windows | SNMP |
|---|---|---|
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Collected data and available extensions
For details on what kind of data is collected by Discovery and imported to Assets, see Discovery data imported to Assets.
You can extend the collected data for all Discovery-Objects by using ExtendedInformation-Object, described in the table below. This helps you add extra information to your assets before they're imported to Assets.
Extended Information (ExtendedInformation-Object)
Extended Information Object can be used to impact the Hash of the parent object by setting the attribute "UseValueForObjectHash" to true in a pattern.
| Attribute | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Name | TEXT | |
| Type | TEXT | Valid Types: Date, Boolean, Integer, String (default) |
| Value | TEXT |
Definition of Unique
In most of the collected objects, you can find an attribute called "Object Hash" which is used as a default Identifier for Assets.
This Object Hash Attributes defining the Object as a unique object in Assets (for creating a new one or updating an existing one).
On the Discovery side you can find an ObjectHashSetting.xml file, this file contains the definition which attributes of the object will be used to build the unique hash.
Manipulations of this file will always have effects to your existing data in Assets.
For example:
If you set the value of:
<HostInfo_FirstNICMAC>true</HostInfo_FirstNICMAC>
from "true" to "false" the NetworkInterface-MAC-Address of the first available NIC will not longer used to build the Host-Hash.
All Host-Hashes will be "new" and importing the data will create new Host-Objects in Assets.