Hi Guys,
I'm doing the planning for a NPM deployment and after reading the NPM Administrators Guide / Evaluation Guide, i'm just a bit confused as to how the Sonar system works.
If there is a whitepaper I can read, happy to go through that, otherwise, grateful if someone could answer the following questions:
- What's the difference between discovering for an IP range or a subnet - am I missing something obvious here?
- If I turn off ICMP discovery, how then does SNMP discovery work within the IP range / subnet - will it do a SNMP equivalent of a ICMP sweep or does it just discover devices that are connected to the Seed router and then work out from there?
- How does the scheduled discovery work as compared to the initial discovery, is it the same method?
- If I disable ICMP discovery and instead rely on SNMP, will I still be able to ICMP poll devices for availability data?
- If I put in a bunch of seed routers for sites and set the hop count to 2, is this how the discovery will occur?
- The seed router will be polled and the ARP table interrogated
- The addresses in the arp table will be polled via SNMP (hop 1) and devices that respond to SNMP strings will be added
- Those addresses will then have their ARP tables interrogated
- The addresses in the 2nd ARP table will be polled via SNMP (hop 2) and devices that respond to SNMP strings will be added
- The next time that discovery is scheduled, the same process will then happen for all existing devices in the database?
- What does this statement mean in the Admin guide "Networks connected through the seed router are NOT automatically selected for discovery"
- Is it trying to imply that networks (e.g. IP / subnet ranges) that are not defined in the discovery scope will not be automatically added to be scanned - this would seem to make sense
- What about devices that are within the (already configured) discovery scope, will they still be discovered if the SNMP strings work as long as they're within the configured hop count?
- What about devices that are within the hop count that are in the ARP table, but are in a different network range - will these still be scanned and added?
- Once a device is discovered and in the system, if a SNMP discovery happens again, will Solarwinds attempt to connect to the device again with the already known SNMP string or will it try to discover it again with all of the SNMP strings in the configured discovery settings
Appologies for all of the questions - we're on a network where we dont have access to all of the Windows servers and other devices so we need to make sure that we understand the impact of deploying the system and we minimise the impact of doing a discovery on other IP devices.
Cheers,
Kieran