About discovery

As a network administrator, you configure and run full and partial discoveries to generate a network topology.

You can keep the discovered topology up to date by scheduling regular discoveries, configuring automatic rediscovery, and manually rediscovering devices.

If new subnets or new devices are added to your network, you can use partial discovery to discover just those subnets and devices.

If you have a very large network, then you can break the discovery of your network into different network domains. Partitioning your network into domains allows you to discover your network in sections. Reasons for partitioning your network include the following:

• Scalability: Your network might be too big to be discovered in one piece.
• Geography: You might want to break the network into geographical regions, and make each region correspond to a domain.
• Logical network boundaries: You might want to discover and manage the network based on particular network boundaries.

You can also queue discoveries for different domains. When the discovery for one domain finishes, the discovery for the next domain in the queue is triggered. Only full discoveries can be queued.

You can also discover links between devices in different domains, and create an aggregated domain, by configuring and running cross-domain discoveries.

Network Manager can also collect network topology data from Element Management Systems (EMSs). Once data is collected from EMSs, it is integrated with other data collected during the discovery.