Network Discovery Settings in Campus Manager

tyagi.vineet · ‎01-07-2008

Hi,

I am using LMS 2.6 to manage cisco Devices.

But I am not unable to discover all the devices having my network, while i have put snmp read and write string all the devices.

From LMS server each and every device is reachable, now i want to confirm in wich manner i have to do network discovery setting (from a ip address range or put each and every device ip address).

akemp · ‎01-07-2008

Ensure CDP is running and allowed on all your interfaces. This will give you the best results.

Under Campus Manager Administration--> Discovery settings you need to:

1. Define seed devices (these are devices which you have configured and tested SNMP connectivity, Read Only is sufficient) in each isolated section of your network (some technologies like ATM play havok with discovery as CDP is blocked) by host address (/32)

2. Define IP address Range of the device you want to discover (a wise thing to do as you'll find things you wouldnt ever think of) which IMHO should be limited to the range of IP addreses that include only the management interfaces of your devices.

3. Click on Apply to kick off your first Major discovery... depending on the server resources and size of your network it could take only 20 minutes or in the case of my network 23 or so hours)

4. Monitor it from the Campus homepage to watch for its conclusion.

5. Thats only half of the process. You now need to configure and run data collection and then user discovery.

6. To configure Data collection, its very similar to device discovery but also dependant on what exactly you have discovered. You can enter in a wild card and collect information on everything you found or limit it to a range of IP addresses. This take a while to run also as it digs into the actual device hardware and software configurations to create a "connect the dots" map of how everything is interconnected and capibilities.

7. User Tracking discovery can only run after Device Discovery and data collection has run.

8. After you've manually run all three of these you can look at the entirity of the information thats readily avaialble for your network. You can decide then how and when to schedule these three to run automatically using these three bits of info:

This is the order in which discoveries must run for a complete set of information: Device Discovery, Data Collection, User Tracking.

The information you collect is only valid as of the time you collected it, its a snapshot in time.

Not every bit of information will be ciollected every since time as numerous factors will inhibit it: device resources, network performance, and what time of day it is.

Joe Clarke · ‎01-07-2008

While most of what you said is correct, point 7 is wrong. Device Discovery is 100% optional. You do not need to run discovery EVER for Data Collection and User Tracking to have accurate data. Discovery is just one way of getting devices into DCR. The keys for getting a proper topology map and end user/phone reports is Campus Data Collection and User Tracking Acquisition. Data Collection will operate on any device in DCR (no matter how it was added) based on the configured Data Collection filters.

akemp · ‎01-07-2008

Optional from a suite functionality standpoint, but I tend to go on the more paranoid side of things and look for rogue devices too :)

Joe Clarke · ‎01-07-2008

Actually, we're looking at adding some more rogue device features in the upcoming CS release. It still doesn't mean discovery is mandatory, but it may help with your paranoia.