Discovery Settings

The Discovery Settings page lets you select the technologies to use for the discovery.

Use the IP Discovery Technologies to Gather More Information

LDAP discovery retrieves the hostname, operating system type and version, and IP address of a discovered device from the LDAP source.

Based on the selected discovery technologies, you can obtain the following additional information on a device:

ZENworks Management Status
Operating System Suites
MAC Address
Network Adapters
CPU
Memory and Disk Space

If you want to obtain additional information, select the Use the IP discovery technologies to gather more information option, and configure the discovery settings.

Override Zone Discovery Settings

Overrides the discovery settings configured at the Management Zone.

If you want to configure the settings on a discovery task, select Override Zone Discovery Settings before you can modify the settings.

Discovery Technologies

The discovery process can utilize a variety of different technologies. When more than one technology is used, the discovery process initiates a discovery request for each technology, with all technology requests running simultaneously. This is done for each target IP address. For example, if you use MAC Address, SNMP, and WMI, the discovery process creates three requests for each target IP address. The requests are queued and run according to the Maximum Concurrent Discoveries setting.

If more than one technology request returns information for a discovered device, the information is merged together. In the case of conflicting information, the discovery process chooses the “best” information. If a high priority discovery technology is successful and returns the information, then the other lower priority discovery technologies are aborted for better performance. For example, if WinAPI or WMI is successful, then MAC address and NMAP technologies are aborted.

Using fewer discovery technologies reduces the time required to complete the discovery task but might also reduce the amount of information received.

Following are brief descriptions of each technology:

MAC Address: Retrieves the MAC Address of the discovered device. Uses the ping and arp (Address Resolution Protocol) commands to map the IP addresses of the devices identified by the IP-based discovery task to their associated MAC addresses. The target devices must reside in the same network as the ZENworks Server that performs the discovery request.
NMAP: Uses NMAP (Network Mapper) to retrieve the OS type and version details of the devices identified by the IP-based discovery task. NMAP must be installed on the ZENworks Server or Windows Proxy that is processing the discovery request. NMAP is freely available from InSecure.org. For detail information on how to configure NMAP for ZENworks, see the ZENworks 10 Configuration Management Discovery and Deployment Reference.
SNMP: Issues a request to the SNMP service on the devices identified by the IP-based discovery task. SNMP versions 2 and 1 are supported, with SNMP version 2 tried first. Retrieves the OS type and version, MAC address, Network Adapters, and CPU details of the device. Because the discovery process uses a Windows-based SNMP technology, requests generated from a ZENworks Server running on Linux must be routed to a Windows proxy for processing. For more information, see Windows Proxy Settings.
SSH: Uses the SSH protocol to communicate with the SSH server on the devices identified by the IP-based discovery task. Depending on the device OS (Linux or NetWare®), the device retrieves the OS type, OS or Kernel version, CPU, Network Adapters, and memory details.
WinAPI: Issues a request to the registry on the devices identified by the IP-based discovery task to retrieve the OS type and version, and CPU details. Because WinAPI is a Windows-specific technology, requests generated from a ZENworks Server running on Linux must be routed to a Windows Proxy for processing. For more information, see Windows Proxy Settings.
WMI: Issues a request to the WMI (Windows^* Management Instrumentation) service on the devices identified by the IP-based discovery task. Retrieves the OS type and version, MAC address, Network Adapters, and CPU details of the device. Because WMI is a Windows-specific technology, requests generated from a ZENworks® Server running on Linux^* must be routed to a Windows Proxy for processing. For more information, see Windows Proxy Settings.
ZENworks: Issues a request to the ZENworks Adaptive Agent or ZENworks pre-agent on the devices identified by the IP-based discovery task. If the device has the ZENworks Adaptive Agent, the agent responds with the OS type and version, MAC Address, Network Adapters, CPU, managed device GUID, Management Zone GUID, Management Zone name, Adaptive Agent version, disk space, and memory details. If the device has the ZENworks pre-agent, the pre-agent responds with the OS type, CPU, disk space, memory, and the GUID (global unique identifier) details that should be used to register the device in the Management Zone.

The pre-agent is only installed on OEM devices or on devices whose registration was removed from the zone.

Credentials

In order for the SSH, WMI, WinAPI, and SSH discovery technologies to retrieve information from devices, you must provide credentials that the discovery technologies can use. However, the NMAP, MAC Address, and ZENworks technologies do not require credentials.

Not all technologies use the same credentials, and all devices might not have the same credentials, so you might need to specify multiple credentials to cover all targeted devices and to utilize all discovery technologies.

Task	Steps	Additional Details
Add a credential	In the Credentials panel, click Add to display the Enter Credential Information dialog box. In the Type field, select the type of credentials you are defining: General: Specifies credentials to be used by all discovery technologies except for SNMP. Linux: Specifies credentials for the SSH technology to communicate with the SSH server on a Linux^* device. Windows: Specifies credentials for the WMI and WinAPI technology to access the WMI service and Windows registry on a Windows device. SNMP: Specifies community strings for the SNMP technology to access the SNMP service on a device. By default, the discovery process uses public as the community string. (Conditional) If you selected General, Linux, or Windows, fill in the username and password. (Conditional) If you selected SNMP, fill in a community string. Click OK to add the credentials to the Credentials panel. Repeat Step 1 through Step 5 to add additional credentials.	If you add multiple credentials of the same type (for example, multiple Windows^* credentials), the technologies that require those credentials use them in the order they are displayed in the Credentials panel, moving from top to bottom. Therefore, you should make sure that you place the most common credentials first in order to speed up the discovery process.
Delete a credential	Select the check box next to the credential (or credentials). Click Delete.
Edit a credential	Select the check box next to the credential. Click Edit. Make changes to the settings.
Save the credentials	Select the Save Credentials to Datastore option.	Unless you save the credentials, they are stored only in memory. Saved credentials are encrypted in the database for increased security. Credentials that are not saved are cleared from memory if the ZENworks Server is restarted. If you are creating a scheduled discovery task, you might want to save the credentials to ensure that they are still available when the discovery is performed.