WhatsUp Gold leverages a list of credentials, a discovery scan profile, and an expert network discovery model to traverse your network, query devices and their management objects, and then line up appropriate default monitors according to the determined role of the discovered device. After a device is discovered, you can choose if you want to manage/monitor the discovered device by adding it to the devices that WhatsUp Gold monitors.

You must run discovery so that WhatsUp Gold can centrally monitor, manage, and enable you to visualize your network on the My Network map.

Tip: When you scan a device, WhatsUp Gold discovery attempts to find device and host-level attributes to learn the device's role within the network (for example, DNS, SMTP, FTP server) and even to extend the scan to other machines on the network ("seeded scan"). Seeded scans seek out connected devices that the current device shares frequent connections/conversations with, network dependencies, or both.

This section includes the following topics: