Summary

This article is an Insight/Assets Discovery tool step-by-step with screenshots, from setting up the Discovery tool to importing its data into Jira.

This article does not cover Discovery agent usage.

Overview

Starting Assets/Insight Discovery

Once you get the Discovery tool zip file, extract it and open a PowerShell terminal from the same directory:

Type discovery.exe -s or ./discovery.exe -s (only for PowerShell) in your terminal or command-line interpreter, it will ask you to add a password the first time you open the Discovery user interface. 

Enter your password. If this is the first time you have used Assets Discovery you will be asked to enter and confirm a new password. This password must contain at least 8 characters including at least one uppercase, one lowercase, one numeric, and one non-alphanumeric (symbol) character.

Once you set the password, you will see the initial Discovery screen.

Configuring Insight Discovery

You have to set up credentials to scan network devices. These credentials on target devices are a pre-requisite, as the Discovery will connect to target devices using WMI, WinRM, SSH, or SNMP.

For every credential you have a test button, to test the connectivity and credential in a target device.

The next step is setting the target device IP addresses to scan. You can add individual IPs, IP ranges, or networks in CIDR notation. You can read more here.

In this example, we are adding also the localhost loopback IP (127.0.0.1). As a first test, we recommend adding at least this, to get data from the computer that is running the Discovery. Note that even for localhost the credentials are required.

After adding the IP range, select the export type to FileCopy and add a single dot (.) to the export path. That way the zip file containing the scan data will be placed in the Discovery main directory or set the export to None to place the file under scans directory.

Later we will change to an automated option to upload the file directly to Jira, but the first time we will need the zip file to set up the Jira import.

Click on the test export path button to confirm the export path is writable.

Running the scan

Now close the Discovery configuration window and execute discovery.exe without any parameter to trigger a scan:

Once the scan ends, if it is successful you will have the zip file created in the Discovery installation directory.

Importing data into Jira

Inside Jira, you will need to install the Assets Discovery app to be able to import this zip file. It's not required for Jira Cloud.

The process below applies to Jira Data Center and Server. Jira Cloud has a similar user interface, but the process to import the zip file is more straightforward.

On Jira Assets, create an Object Schema (or you can reuse an existing one) and go to its configuration page:

Go to the Import tab and create a new Import Configuration.

Select the Assets Discovery import type.

Create the import name, and click on next.

For Jira Data Center, you have to copy the zip file to a place Jira can read it (either in the local-home folder or the shared-home, if clustered). This process can be later automated as you can view at the end of this document.

For Jira Cloud, you can upload directly from the Jira user interface when creating the import.

Select a user to perform the automatic sync and the interval (crontab notation).

Click on Create predefined structure and then on Create predefined configuration. It will create the Object Schema structure and the import configuration automatically based on the Discovery data. That way you don't have to manually create all objects and mappings.

Once finished, you will see the import configuration and object mappings.

Next step is to enable and sync to import the data from the zip file.

Once finished, you will be presented with the import results.

Then returning to the Object Schema, you can view the Objects and imported data.

Automating the import

To automate the import, you can go back to the Discovery tool and select:

1. SFTP, to copy the zip automatically to the Jira local-home or the shared-home location.
2. FileCopy, to copy the zip file to a mounted remote path (Windows)
3. Cloud, to automatically upload to a Jira Cloud instance (a token is required, it can be created from an option in the import configuration we created earlier)

After setting it, you can click on Install Service. It will setup a Windows service, and the scans will be performed according to the Scan schedule settings. When every scan finishes, the file will be automatically sent to Jira if the export type is correctly setup.