This page last changed on Oct 06, 2008 by mmcgarry.

Initiating an Auto-Discovery Scan on a Platform

Topics marked with * relate to HQ Enterprise-only features.

To display the Auto-Discovery page, select the Platform you wish to scan.  Select the Platform from your Dashboard if it appears there, or navigate to it by choosing Browse from the Resource menu in the Masthead, and clicking the Platforms link. After selecting the Platform, choose the New Auto-Discovery option from the Tools menu in the upper right side of the page.

This screen allows users to initiate an auto-discovery scan — either an Auto Scan or a File Scan — on a platform. In order to scan a platform, an Agent must be installed on the platform. (An exception is network devices and network hosts, which can be scanned but do not have Agents on them. In those cases, the connection is proxied through a machine with an Agent running on it.)

The auto-discovery process detects platforms, servers, and services on the platform. The discovered platforms and servers, but not services, will appear in the Auto-Discovery portlet on the Dashboard. When you add the auto-discovered platforms and servers to inventory, the services that were discovered on them are also added to inventory.

Availability of This Screen
This page is available for most platforms (Linux, Windows, and Solaris), but not for Cisco platforms because agents do not run on Cisco devices. In addition, for network devices, because some (though not all) run agents, this screen is available, but without the list of servers.

Feedback is welcome. Click Add Comment at the bottom of the page.

Tasks Available on This Screen

On this screen, users can do the following tasks:

To initiate a "quick" (Auto) scan on the platform:

  • Click at the top of the screen.

To view the results of the last Auto Scan on any managed platform:

  • Click View Last Scan Results just under "Quick Auto Discovery Scan" and proceed to the "Auto-Discovery Results" screen.
    The "Auto-Discovery Results" screen shows the results of the most recently performed auto-discovery scan on any platform, not necessarily the platform viewed on this screen.

To initiate an "extended" (File) scan on the platform:

  1. Check all the Server Types that HQ should look for on the platform.
    This list includes all the managed servers in HQ.
  2. In ScanDirs, specify the directories that HQ should scan in.
  3. In ExcludeDirs, specify the directories that HQ should not scan in.
    Both Scandirs and ExcludeDirs are prepopulated by HQ with the default locations for software installs on the platform type in question.
  4. In fsTypes, select the type of file system to scan: local disks, network-mounted disks, or both ("All Disks"; this can result in a slow scan).
  5. In depth, specify the depth in the directory structure to which HQ should scan.
  6. To have HQ follow symlinks when scanning, check Should symlinks be followed.
    If the symlink and its target are not in the same directory, not following the symlinks will result in the target file not being found.
  7. Click at the bottom of the screen.
    Next Steps

    View the results of the auto-discovery scan.

    Related Information

    An explanation of the auto-discovery process

Return to the platform inventory.

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Document generated by Confluence on Apr 20, 2010 15:01