Discovering device details (context-sensitive)

The discovery of context-sensitive device details is carried out in several steps.

Figure 1 shows how device details are discovered in a context-sensitive discovery.

Figure 1. Discovery process flow: device details (context-sensitive)
Concept diagram that describes how device details are discovered in a context-sensitive discovery.

The process flow shown in Figure 1 is described below.

  •  1 : All the agent despatch tables are active, so an insertion into the Details.despatch table automatically triggers the Details agent to discover basic device information and determine whether or not SNMP access to the device is available.
  •  2 : The Details agent interrogates the network through the Helper Server. Requests are cached to reduce the number of times that the helpers must interrogate the network directly.
  •  3 : The information retrieved from the network is returned to the Details.returns table.
  •  4 : The information in the Details.returns table is passed to the despatch table of the appropriate Context agent, which adds context tags.
  •  5 : After the Context agent has finished its processing, the information is passed to the despatch table of the Associated Address (AssocAddress) agent for processing.