Configuring the Technical Support Appliance

For information to assist you with the installation, planning, and configuration of TSA, go through the following sections.

TSA discovers key IT elements and their relationships within your IT Infrastructure, and securely transmits the data to IBM Support Insights for analysis. The data is used to provide insights into the complex relationships between the servers and network components in your data center.

TSA can discover information about your IT infrastructure, including deployed Operating System components, firmware components, physical servers, network devices, and virtual LAN. To optimize the breadth and depth of information that is collected, configuration tasks are necessary within TSA to identify the discovery devices.

TSA attempts to minimize impacts to the customer's network environment. The discovery process uses an iterative and measured approach, which might cause a full discovery to take up to 72 hours. The status of the discovery job can be monitored by viewing the Job Summary section of the Summary page.

As part of the discovery process, TSA initially attempts to detect devices within the defined scope without using credentials. This process involves the use of Nmap to discover and classify devices through low-intrusive IP scanning, stack fingerprinting, and port mapping. Generally, this activity is not significant enough to set off an Intrusion Detection System (IDS), but might do so if it has stringent local settings.