Discovering Your Enterprise › How You Can Combine Running Classic and Continuous Discovery

How You Can Combine Running Classic and Continuous Discovery

We recommend that you run a combination of Classic and Continuous Discovery when you want to discover subnets. However, Classic and Continuous Discovery work differently depending on what options you select for both methods. You need to be aware of these differences to avoid creating duplicate devices in the MDB.

• Classic Discovery and Continuous Discovery name devices differently:
  • Classic Discovery supports naming a device using its sysname (the MIB-II value for a device that supports SNMP), which is the default if no DNS name is available.
  • Sysnames are not supported by Continuous Discovery, except for routers that do not have valid DNS names for their IP interface cards.

  To avoid discovering duplicate devices, in Classic Discovery, set the dscvrbe -j option to IP to use the IP address if the DNS name cannot be found. Using IP addresses to name discovered devices ensures that objects are named using the same method and that no duplicates result. Set this option only if DNS is not enabled in your environment.

  Note: If you are using the Discovery Classic GUI to run Discovery, select "Use IP address instead of Sysname."

• When you run a full subnet discovery using Classic Discovery, stop the Continuous Discovery services.
• Continuous Discovery discovers only subnets on which an agent is deployed. To discover non-agent subnets because you want to automatically monitor them using Continuous Discovery, you can run the Classic Discovery dscvrbe command to discover a router and all of the subnets it supports, or you can write a script using the dscvrbe -7 option to discover all of the gateways on the desired subnets.