New VM discovery without a network scan

I have the same question.

I'll say that the answer is yes, but the specific execution may vary in terms of how you do it as this would all be relatively custom code using the SDK. 

Since Solarwinds is polling your vcenter periodically it already should already have info about all of the VM's that exist in terms of ip addresses and such.  I would probably use a powershell script to query the list of Virtual machines from the orion.vim.virtualmachines table that have an IP address and are powered on but do not have a NodeID, maybe exclude clusters that are for dev/sandbox.  This would indicate that they haven't been added to NPM/SAM for monitoring yet and we only know about them through the vmware polling.  I would gather all of their IP addresses or dns hostnames and build a discovery but you can also write the script to add the objects directly if you know what you want ahead of time.  Examples of the discovery api are discussed  here:

Discovery · solarwinds/OrionSDK Wiki · GitHub

Once discovered you can have the script or a second phase of it add the nodes and their interfaces/volumes/pollers via the appropriate sdk commands, there are a lot of steps to this but this thread could be a good place to start seeing workign examples of the code to make it all happen and a discussion of the process:

Re: Discovery through SDK is no longer working as expected PowerShell

At the end I'd probably want to use some scripting to automatically populate custom properties where I can:

OrionSDK/CRUD.SettingCustomProperty.ps1 at master · solarwinds/OrionSDK · GitHub

As you may see, at this point this kind of automation is still relatively complex and happens entirely outside of the UI but if you have decent scripting skills in house then I have seen many clients who completely automate their node management and custom properties with pretty slick results. 

-Marc Netterfield

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