Directed Discovery

Directed discovery is the process of manually adding nodes to Meridian through the requisition UI.

Two other methods of manually adding nodes (quick adding a node and manually adding an interface) are in the process of being deprecated. We do not recommend using these features.

Make sure you complete the tasks in Step 3: Provision Inventory before adding nodes.

Add nodes through the requisition UI

Before adding nodes to a requisition, you must create a requisition.

  1. Log in to the Meridian web UI.

  2. Click the gear symbol in the top-right of the screen.

  3. Under Provisioning, click Manage Provisioning Requisitions.

  4. Find the requisition that you want to add nodes to and click Edit beside its name.

  5. Click Add Node. Meridian automatically generates the foreign ID used to identify the node.

  6. Enter the appropriate information in each of the tabs:

    Tab Settings

    Basic Information

    Required: Auto-generated foreign ID, node label
    Optional: Minion location, building, city

    Path Outage

    Parent foreign source, parent foreign ID, parent node label

    Interfaces

    Interface IP addresses, description, SNMP primary, services, actions

    Assets

    Pre-defined metadata types (name, value, actions)

    Categories

    Category name for node type (for example, Routers, Production)

    Meta-Data

    Customized asset information (scope, interface, service, and so on)

  7. Repeat these steps for each node that you want to add.

  8. Click Return to view the list of nodes in the requisition.

  9. Click Synchronize to add the new nodes to the Meridian database.

Add nodes via REST API

You can use the REST API to add nodes to your Meridian database. There are endpoints for both individual nodes and entire requisitions.

Add nodes via newSuspect events

You can use ${OPENNMS_HOME}/bin/send-event.pl to generate newSuspect events:

# ${OPENNMS_HOME}/bin/send-event.pl --interface ip-address uei.opennms.org/internal/discovery/newSuspect (1)
1 Replace ip-address with the IP address that you want to use for discovery.

The events trigger provisiond to check the IP address specified in the command above.

This adds the discovered node directly into your Meridian database. We strongly recommend that you use requisitions when adding individual IP addresses. This will make it easier to manage nodes over time. You can tell the newSuspect event to target a specific requisition by adding the parameter foreignSource to the event.

# ${OPENNMS_HOME}/bin/send-event.pl --interface ip-address -p 'foreignSource requisitionName' uei.opennms.org/internal/discovery/newSuspect