Rule-Based Discovery

With rule-based discovery, you create one or more auto-discovery rules to define the areas of the network that NNMi should discover and include in the NNMi topology. For each rule, you must provide one or more discovery seeds (by explicitly naming seeds or by enabling ping sweep), and then NNMi discovers the network automatically.

Benefits of using rule-based discovery include:

• Good for large networks. NNMi can discover a large number of devices based on minimal configuration input.
• Good for networks that change frequently. New devices that are added to the network are discovered without administrator intervention (assuming that each device is covered by an auto-discovery rule).
• Ensures that any new device added to your network is discovered to comply with service level agreements for managing new devices in a timely manner or security guidelines to flag unauthorized new devices.

Disadvantages of using rule-based discovery include:

• It is easier to run into license limitations.
• Depending on the structure of your network, tuning auto-discovery rules can be complex.
• If auto-discovery rules are very broad and NNMi discovers many more devices than you want to manage, you might want to delete the unneeded devices from NNMi topology. Node deletion can be time consuming.
• All non-seeded nodes receive the default tenant at discovery. If you want to use NNMi multi-tenancy, you must update the tenant assignment after discovery.