Hosts Discovery

The discovery providers are provided from installation of Plugin Packs (Azure, Amazon AWS, VMware, etc.). To know the complete list, please go to the Plugin Packs catalog.

Add a discovery job

To launch a discovery, you need to add a discovery job.

The job addition wizard is a six steps wizard that will allow you to choose a provider, define parameters, define mapping rules and update/execution policies.

Go to Configuration > Hosts > Discovery and click on +ADD.

First, choose a provider by clicking on it:

The search bar allows to search for a specific provider:

The second step allows to define access parameters, especially the monitoring server from which the discovery will be made:

Then, some additional parameters might be needed to define the scope of the discovery:

The fourth step defines how the discovery result will be processed to create hosts in the configuration.

In this step, mappers can be added or rearranged to match needs. See the How to use the mappers chapter to know more.

Realtime simulation on a set of example data gives a preview of what the discovery result could look like:

The fifth and sixth steps only allow to define manual analysis as update policy and immediate as execution policy.

There will be more choices in the future to allow automatic update and cyclic execution.

Click on FINISH on the last step to add and schedule the discovery job.

Manage discovery jobs

Go to the Configuration > Hosts > Discovery menu to access to the list of discovery jobs.

The status of a job can be:

• Scheduled
• Running
• Saving
• Finished
• Failed

If a job is on a Failed status, hover on to the icon to know the reason.

If a job is on a Finished status, click on it to analyse the result. See Analyse a discovery job result to know more.

Jobs can be rescheduled using the Reschedule action

They can also be edited

Or even deleted

Analyse a discovery job result

From the Configuration > Hosts > Discovery menu, click on a Finished job to visualize the result.

Select the hosts you want to add to the configuration and click on SAVE. A task will be launched in background to save the hosts.

Go to the Configuration > Hosts menu to see the newly created hosts. To deploy the services link to the host template, select the hosts and choose Deploy Service from the More actions... drop-down menu.

If the hosts you selected are not visible in the configuration, go back to the job listing and see if an error occured during the saving task.

Edit a discovery job

From the Configuration > Hosts > Discovery menu, click on the Edit action.

On the panel on the right, every parameters of the job can be edited.

Edition of the mapper will have a direct effect on the job result.

Click on the Save icon

How to use the mappers

A mapper is an object letting you map an attribute's value of a discovered item to a property of a future host.

There is four types of mappers:

• Association: map an attribute's value to a common host property like name, alias or IP,
• Macro: map an attribute's value to a host custom macro,
• Template: add a host template,
• Monitoring: choose from which monitoring server will be monitored the host.

For all those mappers, conditions can be applied to choose whether or not the mapping will actually occur.

Conditions are also based on attributes value to which a user defined value is compared using operators. Operators can be : equal, not equal, contain and not contain.

The list of attributes depends on the provider and are listed as Source for both mappers and conditions.

Add a mapper

From the job wizard at step four, or from the edition panel in the Mappers section, click on +ADD MAPPER.

Select the type of mapper from the drop-down list, and fill every required fields.

Click on SAVE to add the mapper.

Edit a mapper

From the job wizard at step four, or from the edition panel in the Mappers section, click on the Edit icon

Change any fields wanted or even the type of mapper.

Click on SAVE to save the mapper.

Delete a mapper

From the job wizard at step four, or from the edition panel in the Mappers section, click on the Delete icon

A popin window will ask you to confirm the action.

Click on DELETE to delete the mapper.

Mappers types

Association

The Association mapper is used to set common properties of a host like its name, alias or IP address. Those three properties are mandatory.

The Source listing allows to choose between credentials, parameters or discovery result attributes.

The Destination listing allows to define to which property the value will be mapped.

Macro

The Macro mapper is used to create custom macros to be defined on the host.

The Source listing allows to choose between credentials, parameters or discovery result attributes.

The Destination is a user defined text field.

The Password checkbox defines if the macro will be created as a password macro or not.

Template

The Template mapper is used to add a template to the host. It is not a replace method.

The Host template listing allows to choose among all host templates defined in the configuration.

Monitoring

The Monitoring mapper is used to choose from which monitoring server will be monitored the host.

The Monitoring instance selector radio buttons allow to choose between the monitoring server defined in the job or from the ones available on the Centreon platform.

This mapper is mandatory.