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Discovering cloud hosts

After BMC Discovery identifies a cloud instance, you might need to determine the type of host on which the cloud is running. Properly marking the host helps reduce the time spent on cloud-related issues by quickly routing them to the appropriate support teams. This process also aids in ensuring seamless tracking and security of cloud environments.

Related topic

Supported-Cloud-Providers


Discovering the host type

BMC Discovery attempts to detect hosts running as cloud-based virtual machines by using the instance metadata services (IMDS) available from most cloud providers. The host type is represented in the form of a virtual or cloud attribute in the instance metadata.

Depending on the platform (LINUX or Windows), BMC Discovery runs the appropriate command. If the first command fails, it attempts subsequent commands from the list until one succeeds. If no commands succeed, then the host is not detected as cloud-based. Some hosts can be virtual and cloud simultaneously.

The following table outlines how BMC Discovery detects cloud-based virtual machines for specific cloud providers:

Cloud provider

Cloud host discovery

Alibaba Cloud Platform

BMC Discovery attempts to retrieve the Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance metadata in security hardening mode; see official Alibaba documentation. 

Amazon Web Services

BMC Discovery uses IMDSv2 to retrieve the EC2 instance ID when detecting EC2-based hosts. If IMDSv2 fails or is disabled, it falls back to IMDSv1. If both methods fail or are disabled, the host is not detected as an EC2 virtual machine; see official AWS documentation.

Google Cloud Platform

BMC Discovery queries the metadata URL to access all values in the GCP metadata server; see official GCP documentation.

IBM Cloud

BMC Discovery detects the IBM host as a cloud-based virtual machine if the dns_domain attribute equals bluemix.net.

Microsoft Azure Cloud

BMC Discovery uses the Azure Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) to retrieve the Azure instance metadata when detecting Azure hosts; see official Microsoft Azure documentation.

OpenStack Cloud

By default, BMC Discovery detects OpenStack hosts as virtual. These hosts, deployed in data centers by using various virtualization tools, are not specifically marked.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Cloud

BMC Discovery uses IMDSv2 to retrieve the OCI cloud instance ID when detecting cloud hosts; see official OCI documentation.

 

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