Now that you’ve set up the prerequisites, you’ll use the steps described in this section for on-going Host Inventory Management. For additional prerequisite details, see Host Access Requirements and Host Inventory Configuration Steps.

Once the prerequisite settings have been configured, a Host Discovery Policy must be created to enable the process of finding hosts in your environment and populating your inventory of hosts.

The Host Inventory Management processes include:

Several tools facilitate Host Inventory Management, as described in the following sections:

Host Discovery begins with a Discovery Policy, which identifies the Data Collector that will gather information about hosts in your environment. In addition, a policy has an associated set of credentials, WMI proxies, and paths to access commands on the hosts. For additional prerequisite details, see Host Access Requirements and Host Inventory Configuration Steps.

A Discovery Policy typically is used once to initially populate your host inventory. Executing a discovery policy more than once has no effect for hosts that were previously discovered. To identify and resolve connectivity issues, see Validate Host Connectivity.

Although all hosts can be included in a single policy, you might want to create one or more Host Discovery Policies in the following recommended groupings:

If your enterprise configures hosts to lock out access after multiple failed authentication attempts, take the following tips into consideration:

Note: A Discovery Policy typically is used once to initially populate your host inventory. Executing a discovery policy more than once has no effect for the subsequent runs for hosts that have already been discovered and added to the inventory.

For additional information about Host Inventory Discovery and Management, see:

To create/edit Host Discovery Policies, select Admin > Data Collection > Host Inventory

 

Collection from clustered SQL Server and Oracle applications requires a specific data collection configuration. Typically, when configuring a Host Discovery Policy, the IP address of the specific host/node should be configured in the policy for direct access to the host’s data. See Configure a Discovery Policy.

In a clustered environment, however, the following configurations are required to gather the host data.

 

 

Several methods can be used to monitor progress:

The Validate step executes the necessary validation steps and provides a summary of the overall success/failure. The Validation process steps through a handshake process, executing the preliminary steps that will occur during data collection. The informative messages enable you to pro-actively identify issues prior to initiating the data collection process.

The Validation process identifies issues such as:

Validation automatically occurs when the Data Collection processes are initiated; however, you can manually start the processes to get immediate feedback so that you can troubleshoot issues.

Once a set of hosts have been selected for validation the current status, as well as the history, can be viewed in a pop-up box.

Before host data can be successfully collected, a number of configuration steps need to be taken. The Show Errors button enables you to identify details to help you troubleshoot host inventory collection issues.

Show Errors lists issues specific to:

Use the following example and steps to view troubleshooting messages.

The Host Discovery process populates your inventory with hosts it finds. Often, discovery policies are designed to discover an IP address range. Host Discovery creates a record for every IP address in the range, even if it’s not in use. Therefore, invalid IP addresses will appear in your Host Inventory. In addition, Discovery may find printers, routers, or switches, or other devices that aren’t relevant for host data collection.

To filter your host inventory to include only hosts for which you want data collected, use the following options:

The Host Inventory window offers a Search feature to help you find hosts that have been discovered.

Note: A search with no specified criteria returns all hosts in your inventory.

Several pre-defined searches enable easy access to host lists that are useful for troubleshooting.

To export the details of the Host Inventory to a comma-separated-values file (.csv):

Host Resources Data Collection can gather the following information by probing hosts:

Using Host Resources data collection, hosts are discovered and added to the Host Inventory. Once a host is listed in the inventory, it can be selected and the File Analytics probe can be configured. To access the Host Inventory to enable File Analytics probes: Admin > Data Collection > Host Inventory

Note that by design, File Analytics host resources data collection occurs via activation of the probe in the Host Inventory window in the Portal. Collection does not occur under the following circumstance:

Windows servers: A Data Collector must be running on a Windows 2008 server. A Domain Administrator ID is required when collecting file-level data for File Analytics.

Linux servers: Only Linux is supported (Solaris, Linux, and AIX, but not HP-UX), with the following requirements:

If running collection via the checkinstall utility, verify the following:

 

 

 

Whenever you have hosts with common attributes, you can save time by configuring probe settings for one host and then copying and pasting those settings to other hosts.

A key advantage to using the probe copy/paste feature is the ability to propagate the probe schedules to multiple hosts. In addition, you can explicitly select the probes you want to activate.

Note: You only can copy/paste probes that are within the same Domain. This mainly impacts Managed Services Providers with multi-domain environments. Use the Advanced Search function to list probes within a specific Domain.