Discovery schedules

You can schedule discoveries to ensure that information presented in the Discovery Management Console is always current and accurate.

In most cases, partition your environment into operational groups and perform discoveries on these subsets of your organization. This reduces the time it takes to complete a particular discovery, and takes into account that different sections of your environment change at different rates.

If you create a schedule to run a discovery, it binds the current scope to that schedule. Later, if you want to add a new entry to the scope, you must delete the schedule and create a new one. You can schedule a discovery to perform the following tasks:

  • Identify operational groups within your environment. Different sections of your environment are likely to have different rates of change. By identifying operational groups on your network by IP addresses, IP address ranges, and subnets, you can schedule partitions of your infrastructure to have different discovery schedules.
  • Check the discovery history to determine how long it typically takes to complete different types of discoveries in your environment.

    Discovery schedules cannot overlap. The first discovery must complete before a new discovery can begin. If a discovery is scheduled to start before an existing discovery finishes, the new discovery does not start and an error is logged.

    Check the discovery history to estimate the typical completion time for different discoveries, so that you can prevent potential schedule overlaps.

  • Schedule discoveries based on the operational groups that you identified. Configure most of your scheduled discoveries to refresh a subset of your topology. For example, depending on the size of your environment and your operational needs, you can schedule a full discovery once every 24 hours, or complete a discovery of the application tier once every six hours.

When you create a discovery schedule, you specify the start time and the frequency of discoveries. You can also define the scope of a particular discovery by selecting the scope elements (subnets, IP addresses, or ranges), components, or views to include in the discovery.