Use > Server Automation > Running SA extensions > Running extensible discovery on managed servers

Running extensible discovery on managed servers

SA can gather a large amount of information from your servers by default. Extensible Discovery lets you gather additional information about your servers quickly and easily. Extensible Discovery is a feature that you can customize and use to discover and obtain custom information about servers in your managed environment.

This section describes how to run Extensible Discovery. To customize Extensible Discovery and add your own scripts, see Adding scripts to extensible discovery.

  • To run Extensible Discovery, you must have write access to the managed servers where you want to run Extensible Discovery and you must have execute access to the Extensible Discovery folder in the SA Library. For more information on permissions, see the SA 10.50 Administration Guide.
  • You cannot run Extensible Discovery on VMware ESXi hypervisor servers because SA does not install an Agent on ESXi servers. Instead, SA manages ESXi servers through the VMware vCenter virtualization service. For more information, see "Virtualization management" in the SA 10.50 User Guide.

To run Extensible Discovery:

  1. Run the Extensible Discovery extension as described in Run extensions on managed servers. This does the following:
    1. Remediates the software policies “Customer Provided Scripts” and “HPE provided Scripts” on the selected servers. This copies all the scripts in these policies to all the managed servers. It places the scripts on the managed servers.
    2. Runs all the scripts in the Extensible Discovery directory on the selected servers.

    3. Places the output from the scripts either in custom attributes or custom fields.

      Note
      The first time you run Extensible Discovery on a server will typically take longer than subsequent runs because it needs to install scripts on the server the first time you run it.

  2. Examine the results by viewing the Custom Attributes or Custom Fields for each server.
  3. If an error occurs, check the following custom attributes for more information.
    • HPSW_ED_error: If an error occurs on a server, this custom attribute will be created for the server and it will contain any relevant error messages. To determine which servers had an error, you can search for servers with this custom attribute.

      If Extensible Discovery runs without errors on the server later, this custom attribute will be removed.
    • HPSW_ED_warning: This custom attribute will be created on servers where a non-fatal warning occurs.

      If Extensible Discovery runs without warnings on the server later, this custom attribute will be removed.

      For more information, see Comparing custom fields and custom attributes.

Running extensible discovery from the OGSH

You can also run Extensible Discovery from the Global Shell (OGSH) using the command interface as follows:

/opsw/apx/bin/com/opsware/extensible_discovery -d <server ids> -g <group ids>

The following table describes the options to this command.

Options to the extensible_discovery command

Option

Usage

-h
--help

Displays help for this command.

-d <server ids>
--deviceids=<server ids>

Specifies one or more server IDs or server names separated by commas. Runs Extensible Discovery on the specified servers.

-g <group ids>
--groupids=<group ids>

Specified one or more device group IDs or device group names separated by commas. Runs Extensible Discovery on all the servers in the specified groups.

To find a server ID or a device group ID in the SA Client, display the server or device group and locate the ID in the Object ID column. The Object ID is an integer value.

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