Monitoring Ping finder status

During the Interrogating Devices phase, the Ping finder pings each device within the configured scope zones. You can use the Discovery Status GUI to track the progress of the Ping finder through the subnets of each scope zone.

In the Discovery Status GUI, click Ping Finder Status.

The Ping Finder Status section of the GUI shows the Ping Finder Status table. This table lists all the subnets that make up the scope zones that you configured earlier.

The Ping Finder Status table contains the following information:

Address: A list of IPs and subnets discovered to this point.
Netmask: For each subnet, this column indicates the netmask value.
Last Pinged: The last IP address pinged in this subnet.
Status: Indicates whether the Ping finder is still pinging this device or subnet or whether it has completed pinging.

For example, based on the scope zones that you configured, the Ping Finder Status table might look something like this:

Table 1. Example of data in Ping Finder Status table
Address	Netmask	Last Pinged
10.30.1.20	-	-
10.30.0.0	255.255.0.0	10.30.255.5
10.40.0.0	255.255.0.0	10.40.39.3

This example shows that the pinging of your configured scope zones is proceeding. In particular:

The single IP address scope zone 10.30.1.20 has been successfully pinged.
All of the routers in the subnet 10.30.0.0 have been successfully pinged. The managed area here was made up of a complex IP address range, and to define this range you had to configure a prediscovery filter to exclude all IP addresses in the Class B subnet 10.30.0.0 outside of the range defined by 10.30.*.1-5. As you can see from the table, the last IP address to be pinged was 10.30.255.5, which is the very last IP address in this complex range.
The Class B subnet 10.40.0.0 is still in the process of being pinged. Class B subnets can take up to two to three hours to ping sweep, because the discovery process has to try pinging every single possible IP address in the subnet. For a Class B subnet, that is 65,536 attempted IP address pings. As you can see from the table, the discovery has just pinged the IP address 10.40.39.3, so it still has a lot of pinging to do.

Note: If the Class B subnet 10.40.0.0 is a sparsely populated subnet then, when the Interrogating Devices phase completes, the Ping finder might not yet have completed pinging the subnet. By default, if, following the end of Phase 1, the Interrogating Devices phase, 90 seconds passes without the Ping finder finding any more devices, then the discovery enters what is known as the blackout state. During the blackout state the rest of the discovery phases progress normally but the Ping finder continues to ping sweep the sparsely populated Class B subnet 10.40.0.0, and any new IP addresses that are found are held in a special database table until the discovery phases complete for the IP addresses discovered up to the moment when the blackout state began. Once those discovery phases are complete, then the discovery process resumes for these addresses discovered during the blackout state.

You have now spent some time monitoring Ping finder status and you have concluded that pinging of subnets is progressing satisfactorily. Once a device has been pinged by the Ping finder and its existence has therefore been verified, the discovery process passes the device details to the discovery agents for information retrieval from the device. The next step is therefore to monitor the progress of the discovery agents.