Agents

Discovery agents retrieve information about devices in the network. They also report on new devices by finding new connections when investigating device connectivity. Discovery agents are used for specialized tasks. For example, the ARP Cache discovery agent populates the Helper Server database with IP address-to-MAC address mappings.

In addition to the main discovery agents, which can be enabled or disabled according to your discovery requirements, there are two agents that must always be run: the Details agent and the Associated Address agent.

Each discovery agent has its own database resident within DISCO. These databases are generically structured and based on a template called the agentTemplate database.

Each discovery agent database contains the following tables:

agentName.despatch
agentName.returns

Note: The default configuration sets the majority of agents to run. This is because the more agents that are run, the wider the range of networks that can be discovered. Furthermore, agents are designed to quickly stop analyzing devices that do not provide the data they require. This means that running a large number of agents increases network traffic by a very small amount only.

Note: Network Manager kills all discovery agents at the end of data collection stage 3. This ensures that the next discovery restarts the agents and forces the agents to reread their configuration files at the beginning of a discovery, thereby detecting any changes to the configuration files.