Discovery

The Discovery process is the mechanism that enables you to collect information about your IT infrastructure resources and their interdependencies. Discovery automatically discovers and maps logical application assets in Layers 2 through 7 of the Open System Interconnection (OSI) Model.

Discovery discovers resources such as installed and running applications, network devices, servers, and so on. Each discovered IT resource is delivered to, and stored in, the configuration management database (CMDB) where the resource is represented as a managed CI.

Discovery is an ongoing, automatic process that continuously detects changes that occur in the IT infrastructure and updates the CMDB accordingly. You can discover nodes using agent-based or agentless discovery.

After configuration, Universal Discovery automatically discovers the network on which the Data Flow Probe is located, the Node on which the Probe resides, and the Node's IP address. A CI is created for each of these objects. These discovered CIs populate the CMDB. They act as triggers that activate discovery jobs. Every time a job is activated, the job discovers more CIs, which in turn are used as triggers for other jobs. This process continues until the entire IT infrastructure is discovered and mapped.

For details on out-of-the-box discovery packages and supported integrations, see the Universal CMDB Discovery and Integrations Content Guide.

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