Network Discovery

The discovery process identifies devices and entities on your monitored network through either active or passive discovery.

What is active discovery?

Active discovery queries nodes and to detect the entities that you want to monitor. You can choose from two active discovery methods:

  • ICMP/SNMP: Performs a ping sweep and scans for SNMP MIBs on nodes that respond.

  • Azure: Connects to the Azure API, queries the virtual machines list, and creates entities for each VM in the node inventory.

You can create multiple discovery events to target specific areas of your network.

Benefits: Can be more comprehensive than passive discovery.

Disadvantages: Can slow network performance as the discovery process tries to connect to all devices.

What is passive discovery?

Passive discovery uses SNMP traps to identify network devices. It does so by monitoring their activity through events, flows, and indirectly by evaluating other devices' configuration settings.

Note that you can set only one passive discovery configuration.

Benefits: Low bandwidth consumption.

Disadvantages: May miss devices if they are not active.