Discovery tool

Svend · Joined: 23 Sep 2005 Posts: 38

I've spent the last few hours setting up tests for a network of 20+ servers, just to get disk usage information.

What I'm wishing for is a tool that would allow me to define a subnet (or range of subnets) and some user credentials and then define a set of tests to run on all hosts found across the subnet. This would then copy the test creating an instance of it for each host discovered and populating the comments field and the test name based on the name of the host or its IP for each host found.

An ability to create new folders based on results of the discovery, e.g. Operating System, netbios name, subnet (based on a mask), domain (for really big networks) and move the test into the apropriate folder would quickly build a test base.

Then I would go and sort them into folders as required and perhaps define additional tests based on what I now know about the hosts.

It would be very good to get the operating system of hosts (assuming they care to give it to you).

With this you could also possibly define an audit process. E.g. if I'm licensed for 20 Windows2003 servers and a 21st shows up I could send an alert to the guy who tracks license assets.

From there you get a whole swag of new features that could be implemented.

It would be cool - I know it would take plenty of work. Maybe in version 10.

Svend.

KS-Soft · Joined: 03 Apr 2002 Posts: 12795 Location: USA

Yes, we plan to implement such tool but not very soon. May be version 8 or 9.
Meanwhile Replicator may save a lot of time in many cases
http://www.ks-soft.net/hostmon.eng/replicator/index.htm

Regards
Alex

KS-Soft · Joined: 03 Apr 2002 Posts: 12795 Location: USA

Probably we implement such tool in version 8. I think we need your help to decide what templates/scanners should be implemented in the first place.
Some thoughts

1) I think there no much sense to scan for shared network resources and setup File/Folder Availability, File Integrity and other file related tests. Its pretty specific tests for some specific applications on specific servers...

2) I think its good to scan for
- Ping reply
- TCP ports
- SNMP
- Acess to services
- Access to Event Log
- WMI
- Performance Counter

Then its pretty easy to automatically setup tests like Ping, CPU Usage. Set of TCP tests can be created easily as well (you may provide list of TCP ports before scan)...

What about SNMP, Event Log, Performance Counter and WMI?
What OIDs, counters, events, WMI Queries do you use?
What services / processes do you monitor? I do not ask about some specific homemade service installed on single host in the world; I mean what services / processes do you monitor on regular basis?

Regards
Alex