The Key Concepts of Discovery Manager

Anton Petersson

Helping you turn insights into actions with vScope

vScope has a world leading discovery engine. To manage it you will need to understand how Discovery Manager functions. These are the key concepts you need to started.

The basics – Targets & Credentials

vScope allows you to setup automatic inventories of your entire IT. But to get it to work you will need keys and tell vScope where to find the keyholes. Credentials are keys and targets are keyholes.

The Keys – Credentials

There can be different types of Credential types in vScope. There are one credential for each platform supported in vScope meaning that if you want to inventory Windows OS of your machines you will need to add a “WMI” type of credential.

Credentials in Discovery Manager

Credentials are managed under the Credential tab in vScope. From here you can add, edit and delete credentials. Notice that each type of credential requires different kind of information. Credentials are ASSIGNED to targets. You can se how many targets a credential is assigned to in the forth column.

The Keyholes – Targets

Targets in vScope are basically IPs, hostnames, ranges or cloud portals to which you aim your Credentials. A range is a scope of IP addresses, a way to shortcut many single IP targets. For virtualization hosts or domain controllers you’d probably use single targets but for larger server or printer networks we suggest you use ranges instead.

Targets are by default inventoried from your vScope server, however you can assign targets to Proxies and have them inventoried from another machine.

Targets in Discovery Manager

Targets can be found under the Targets tab in Discovery manager. Notice that some of these are single target IPs while others are ranges. To discover information from our DMZ we set up a proxy which you can see in the third column “Proxy”.

Checkpoint#1

If you got this far, you are good to go. These first basic principles will get you going and allow you to start inventory your IT. Congratulations!

Next level – Discovery Schedules

To do the first inventory and use your Credentials and Targets you need to run a Discovery. Discoveries in vScope is setup using “Schedules”. A Schedule is basically your way to configure: what resources shall be inventoried and when. Adding multiple Schedules will allow you to discover information from different parts of your network at different times and intervals. Perfect for remote branches abroad, closed networks or if you are keen to keep information from some platforms up-to-date more frequently.

Discovery Schedules in vScope

In the Schedules tab you can add and manage Discovery schedules to run. By default you will only have one schedule – a Main Schedule.

What is ‘Main Schedule’?

Main Schedule discovers, by default, all credentials and targets you have added to Discovery Manager. You can select when and how often it should run.

Adding more schedules

You can add more schedules in which you need to select whether to run discovery of credentials, targets or proxies. Proxies is perfect for DMZ:s or remote sites. Credentials for platform specific discoveries. Targets, eg. certain printer networks, can also be used if you want.

Important notice about Main Schedule when adding more schedules

Once you start adding more schedules, its content (targets & credentials) will be excluded from the Main Schedule. The reason for this is that we don’t want to inventory twice and put unnecessary load on the Discovery.

Checkpoint#2

Well done! You can now add credentials and targets, and customize when to discover them. In the next level we introduce a little bit of complexity but also convenience.

Final level – Streamlined setup with Smart Targets

The truth is that some targets can produce additional targets for vScope to inventory. For instance, your vCenter/System Center knows a lot about your VMs eg. IP address and operating system. From this information, vScope can automatically generate targets for you and suggest you to scan these targets with a certain platform (eg. WMI for a VM running Windows Server 2016). These kind of targets are called Smart Targets in vScope.

By using Smart Targets, a quick setup of vScope would just require a few credentials and very little knowledge about your IP configurations. These will be found from your hypervisors or domain controllers anyway.

Smart Targets in vScope

Smart Targets are found under the Targets tab. They are highlighted green and grouped depending on platform. They are really easy to use, just assign a credential to the target (of the correct type!) and you are good to go. Just remember that you will have to add either an LDAP or VMware/WMI credential to find any Smart Targets from other platforms.

…And some additional help – Suggestions

Once you get a hang of Discovery Manager you’d probably like to discover more and more information. The setup will be a little more complex and if anything happens (eg. a credential expires or a new firewall policy blocks some targets) you want to be alerted of this. The Discovery tab in Discovery Manager therefore continuously serves you with actionable suggestions about how to make your Discovery run smoother and increase coverage.

Troubleshoot with Discovery result section

If you want, you can troubleshoot your Discovery results by looking into the Discovery results section. You can select what schedule and specify what session to troubleshoot. Filter out warnings and take action to improve the Discovery scope.