HP Systems Insight Manager 5.2 Update 2 Technical Reference Guide

5 Discovery and identification
Discovery is the process of finding systems in the management domain so that they can be managed from
the Central Management Server (CMS) by HP Systems Insight Manager (HP SIM).
There are two types of discovery:
• Automatic discovery The process that HP SIM uses to find and identify 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. The primary source for automatic discovery is ping sweeps configured in the
automatic discovery tasks page. Other sources might include receiving events from unknown systems
or from a management processor that has information about a server. Identification automatically runs
on discovered systems.
• Manual discovery Manual discovery is 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.
You can only perform discovery if you have administrative rights .
Automatic discovery
The option Automatically discover a system when an event is received from it is disabled by default,
but can be enabled by selecting it in the General Settings for All Discoveries section. For discovery to
run, you must enable the default System Automatic Discovery task by selecting Options→Discovery,
selecting the default task, and then clicking Enable. HP recommends editing this task to ensure that the IP
range is correct.
To access the General Settings for All Discoveries section, select Options→Discovery, click the
Automatic tab, and then click Configure general settings. In the section, Do this now to finish the
installation, on the introductory page, click Automatic, or from the Manage section of the Homepage,
click discovery.
Alternatively, you can click Edit, instead of Enable, to edit and save the task. In the Schedule section,
select Automatically execute discovery every, and then set the discovery time. If you disable automatic
discovery, no new automatic discovery is performed until you enable automatic discovery 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 about scheduling automatic discovery.
HP SIM performs automatic discovery using the Internet Protocol (IP).
Internet Protocol
HP SIM discovers systems running the IP 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 that 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 section, Ping inclusion ranges, system (hosts) names, templates, and/or hosts files. To access
the Configuration section, click the Automatic tab, and then 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 can be obtained, the fully qualified Domain Name Service (DNS)
names of the systems are used for each IP. To ensure systems are resolved, for each IP address, the fully
qualified DNS names must match.
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. Event-based automatic discovery
Automatic discovery 93