The Discovery Engine

BMC Atrium Discovery's unique approach to discovery combines multiple discovery techniques with intelligent co-ordination and analysis. Information about your organization's hardware and software is obtained by the Discovery Engine. The Discovery Engine is supported by the Reasoning Engine which intelligently infers the maximum amount of information about hosts and programs and populates the data model.

The major features of BMC Atrium Discovery's discovery are:

• Discovery UI – simple management of the discovery process.
• Scanning levels – can be set for individual discovery runs.
• Exclude ranges entry – simple management of IP ranges that must not be scanned.
• Creation of Directly Discovered Data – provides an exact record of what has been discovered. You can also run search queries across your data.
• Reliable stopping and restarting – when Discovery is stopped, all runs are paused and their state is saved so each run can continue when Discovery is restarted.
• Consolidation – consolidation of scanned data from multiple scanning appliances to a single consolidation appliance.

A pattern can invoke Discovery as required, for example to read a file or execute a command.

Terminology relating to Discovery in BMC Atrium Discovery:

• Discovery Endpoint – a Discovery Endpoint is the endpoint of a single Discovery Access. Currently this is the IP address of the discovery target.
• Discovery Run – a Discovery Run is a scan of one or more Discovery Endpoints, specified as an IP address or addresses or ranges which are scanned as an entity.
  For each Discovery Run, a DiscoveryRun node is created which records information such as the user who started the run, the start and end time, and so on.
• Discovery Access – a DiscoveryAccess page is a single access to a Discovery Endpoint. When an endpoint is scanned, a Discovery Access node is created which records information such as the start time, end time, the Discovery Run which contains this Discovery Access, and the previous Discovery Access for the same endpoint to make troubleshooting easier.

Host nodes are only created once BMC Atrium Discovery has concluded that a unique host exists. Typically this is after a successful login is achieved.
For every endpoint (IP address) that is scanned, a Discovery Access Node is created, regardless of whether there is any response from that address. If there is no response or an error, this information is stored on the Discovery Access Node.

For information on how to configure Discovery, see the BMC Atrium Discovery Configuration Guide.