I believe controlling whether discovered nodes are managed in NCM at the point of discovery, per discovery, rather than the current 'all or nothing' approach, would be a lot more user friendly, and allow for a more logical workflow.
At the moment, when you run a discovery and you have NCM licensed, your nodes are automatically added to NCM, and hence automartically consume license resource. There is a setting that disables this behaviour, but it's somewhat buried. To find it, and admin will need to:
- If an admin were to go to Settings > All Settings,
- From the 'Product Specific Settings' section, go to 'NCM Settings'.
- In the 'Advanced' section of NCM Settings, select 'Advanced Settings'
- Finally, at the bottom of the page, you'll find this buried gem:
- Checking this gem of a setting:
- Checking this box disables adding discovered nodes to NCM, although the 'Config Management' tab is still visible in the discovery wizard.
What I propose is to remove the check box from the 'Advanced Settings' location it currently has, but instead move it to a per-discovery / discovery profile setting. I envisage a YES/NO toggle, either at the top of the 'Config Management' tab of the discovery wizard, or on the 'Monitoring Settings' tab, beneath the option to 'Include devices/nodes that respond to ICMP (ping) alone' setting, a little like this:
Not only does this feel more like a more natural place for such a powerful option, it would also be particularly useful in environments which have limited NCM licensing, ensuring that scheduled discoveries of AD OU's, subnets, and so on, will not lead to NCM license exhaustion.
