The role of BMC Atrium Discovery and how it discovers data

BMC Atrium Discovery identifies systems in the network and obtains relevant information from them as quickly as possible and with the lowest impact, using a variety of different tools and techniques to communicate. It combines multiple discovery techniques with intelligent coordination and analysis to gather information about your organization's hardware and software. For software license management, BMC Atrium Discovery not only discovers configuration items (CIs) and provides the information in a single, automated view, but it also maps business applications to their underlying physical and virtual infrastructure so you can see exactly how your infrastructure supports your business.

For more information on how BMC Atrium Discovery works, including discovery service basics, see Introduction to Discovery.

After the initial discovery and population of BMC Atrium CMDB, the Discovery Manager and Configuration manager should plan the deployment of the estate and consider certain performance factors to ensure that discovery changes (such as new, modified, or removed CIs), are continually and effectively merged with production configuration data.

For more information about configuring discovery settings and recommended performance factors, refer to the BMC Atrium Discovery 8.3 Deployment Guide. From that page there is also a link that enables you to download a PDF version of the guide.

How BMC Atrium Discovery discovers configuration data

The Discovery Engine obtains information about your environment. It is supported by the Reasoning Engine, which intelligently infers the maximum amount of information about hosts and programs and populates the BMC Atrium Discovery data model. The data model and the approach to data storage enables you to model complex IT environments in such a way that the model is a very close representation of the actual environment. The model is constructed from discovery information, potentially augmented with data imported from other sources, and is an approximation of the actual state of the environment.

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.