HP SIM V5.1 User Guide (356920-009, January 2007)

5 Discovery and identification
Discovery can only be performed if you have full configuration rights .
There are two types of discovery:
• Automatic discovery Automatic discovery is the process that HP Systems Insight Manager (HP SIM)
uses to find and identify the systems on your network and populate the database with that information.
A system must first be discovered to collect data and track system health status .
• Manual discovery The process that enables you to bypass a full automatic discovery and add single
or multiple systems to the database, create or import the HP SIM database hosts file, and create or
import a generic hosts file.
Automatic discovery
The Automatically discover a system when an event is received from it feature is disabled by default
and can be enabled by selecting it in the General Settings section. You must enable the default System
Automatic Discovery process for discovery to run. Select Options→Discovery, select the default task,
and click Enable. HP recommends editing this task to ensure the IP range is correct.
To access the General Settings section, select Options→Discovery, click the Automatic tab, and then
click Configure general settings. Click Automatic in the Do this now to finish the installation section
of the introductory page, or click discovery in the Manage section of the Home page.
Alternatively, you can click Edit, instead of Enable, edit, and save the task. In the Schedule section, select
Automatically execute discovery every: and set the discovery time. If you disable automatic discovery,
no new automatic discovery is performed until you enable it by visiting the Discovery page and making
your selections. You can also perform a manual discovery any time that you choose. See “Configuring
automatic discovery” for more information on scheduling automatic discovery.
HP SIM performs automatic discovery using the Internet Protocol (IP) protocol.
IP protocol
HP SIM discovers systems running the IP protocol when it pings systems in a listed range of addresses. It
defaults to the local subnet , a range that corresponds to the IP addresses assigned to the system where HP
SIM is running. You can change the address list to indicate other systems or segments of the network you
want HP SIM to discover.
Web Agents are not discovered unless HTTP is enabled on the Global Protocol Settings page in the HTTP
settings (default) section. To enable HTTP, see “Setting global protocols” for information. To ensure that
clusters are discovered in automatic discovery, the cluster IP address and all node addresses must be listed
in the Ping inclusion ranges, templates and/or hosts files section. To access the Configuration section,
click the Automatic tab, and click New for a new discovery task or click Edit to edit an existing discovery
task.
HP SIM uses a globally unique system identifier obtained from the system to help identify HP systems with
multiple IP addresses. If no unique identifier could be obtained, then the systems fully qualified DNS name(s)
for each IP will be used. To ensure systems are resolved, the fully qualified DNS names must match for each
IP address.
Event-based automatic discovery
Event-based automatic discovery is disabled by default. You can enable this feature by selecting
Automatically discover a system when an event is received from it. If selected, event based automatic
discovery adds any systems that send SNMP traps , WBEM indications, or other events to HP SIM that do
not have a matching IP address in the database. The Ping exclusion ranges, templates, and/or hosts
files option allows the entry of any IP addresses that you want excluded from event based automatic discovery.
If SNMP is disabled on the Global Protocols Settings page under Options→Protocol Settings→Global
Protocol Settings, then SNMP traps are ignored. If WBEM is disabled, then WBEM indications are also
ignored.
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