Host discovery and collection setup overview
Note that some steps typically are required only as part of the initial configuration and rarely require additional maintenance. For the purpose of this document, these initial steps are treated as requirements.
Note:
Each step is summarized in this section. To access detailed descriptions, click the links for each step. The buttons at the bottom of the window----are described in the section,
See Host discovery and collection maintenance overview.
Prior to discovering hosts, a data collector policy must be configured. You can use an existing policy--for example, a data collector policy that has been created for Storage Array data collection--or create a new data collector policy.
Using the Host Discovery and Collection window, you can search for hosts in the inventory; or you can set up configurations in preparation for discovering and configuring hosts. Many of the probes may not be applicable to your enterprise. It is essential that you identify the probes that are relevant to your hosts.
See Configure/Search.
Configure user IDs and passwords for authentication when the data collector is accessing hosts.
A WMI Proxy is required to collect data from Windows hosts. Use this option to define one or more WMI Proxies.
See Manage WMI Proxy.
- Configure the paths that data collectors will use to execute commands on hosts.
See Manage paths.
Data Collectors require read-only access to execute non-intrusive commands on hosts. It is strongly recommended that a separate login account, used strictly for IT Analytics, be established and using Active Directory for Windows systems and the sudo command for Linux systems, restrict the commands that IT Analytics can issue. To accommodate this security approach, you can optionally specify access control commands like sudo, sesudo, or pbrun. Files containing sudo commands per operating system can be found on the Portal server in: /opt/aptare/updates. These filenames contain both the OS and the version of the sudo commands file so that you can identify the files that contain the latest updates; for example: hpux_9.1.01, aix_9.1.01, linux_9.1.01, solaris_9.1.01.
Host Discovery attempts to find hosts and populate your host inventory. Create Host Discovery Policies that use the credentials, WMI proxies, and paths that you configured.
Host validation must take into account host access for a wide variety of conditions and environments. As the discovery process accesses hosts, informative messages will provide clues to connectivity issues. In addition, devices that don't belong in a host inventory--for example, printers in the IP address range that you specified--may have been discovered and need to be hidden or removed from the inventory.
See Configure host discovery policies to populate the host discovery and collection view.