Before you can manage and monitor devices with WhatsUp Gold, launch the Discovery Scan wizard (DISCOVER > New Scan) and run it. The wizard guides you through steps needed to discover devices, identify device roles, and detect the services these devices provide over your network. Use the in-wizard controls to configure settings, launch scans, and save settings used for the current run. Wizard settings are saved as discovery scan settings. Discovered devices do not count against your licensing until you select them and Start Monitoring.

What can WhatsUp Gold discover?

WhatsUp Gold Discovery can scan any network, subnet, or IP address reachable from your WhatsUp Gold installation. Scans have the ability to apply device credentials where appropriate. This feature is what differentiates it from other network scanners and enables WhatsUp Gold to gather rich and accurate device, platform, and guest OS information. In contrast, ping, ARP, and 'public' information such as SNMPv1 queries can return sparse information, no information, or in the case of "ping" requests wrong information because the request can be ignored by a firewall. Credentials also enable you to integrate monitoring solutions with cloud resources (AWS, Azure, and Meraki) and their management endpoints at discovery time. Target IP addresses are not needed for cloud resources, but including a cloud credential with your scan settings is required to discover cloud.

What is needed to run the Discovery Wizard?

All you need to run Discovery Wizard is a starting device IP or subnet and one or more credentials that can be used to query the connected device for information. The type of information you want is related to the type of credential you provide.

Tip: If you are just starting out with WhatsUp Gold, you can just click the Review and Run tab and then click Run to discover your default gateway device. (To help you out, the Discovery Scan wizard already pre-populates the Starting Device Set page with a single IP address, which is the gateway IP address known to the WhatsUp Gold server.)

Guidelines for configuring discovery with the wizard

Discovery Wizard provides a full set of basic (Start tab and Limit and Expand subtabs) and advanced configuration options (Options tab). You can perform everything from a simple ping/ARP scan on an private network to a deep scan using domain, cloud, and virtual host credentials (and every range and scope of scan in-between). Use the guidelines in this section and the "circle i" () informational text to understand the settings that satisfy the goals of your scan.

Guideline

Details

Understand the purpose for the scan

The simplest scans (such as ping/ARP/Public SNMPv1) run very quick but only check basic connectivity for the list of target IP addresses you provide. They validate that an IP address is in use and check that typical ports are active. When it comes time for you to add monitoring, without knowing more details about the device WhatsUp Gold initially adds TCP and ping monitors.

Tip: Windows Firewall and other packet filtering methods can ignore or block ping (Echo) requests. If you add appropriate credentials using the Discovery Wizard (Windows in this case) your scan can see past false negatives.

Deeper Discovery scans (such as seeded scans with credential lists that might include platform, VM host, VM guest, cloud resource credentials, and more) take longer to complete because Discovery learns more as it runs and processes that information to produce more accurate and interesting results (such as target device OS, target device services that are network available, and more). When it comes time for you to add monitoring, WhatsUp Gold uses these results to start the device out with a useful list of monitors.

It is best practice to take small bites (at first)

Consider these hints:

  • Start with a Host List, a small subnet, or a few target IP addresses before you try to scan a larger subnet or an entire network.
  • Saved discovery scan settings are easy to modify and re-use. Save the settings from runs that work best.
  • You can add credentials to a saved settings for a simple scan so you can re-run it later as a deep discovery scan.
  • If you 'go big' with a scan, you can use the Limit sub tab and even the Maximum Number of Devices threshold to tune and cap a scan's reach.

Seeded scans cast a 'wide net'

For example, let's say you are starting out by using only the default gateway as a device to discover. If you run the Discovery Wizard on the IP address of the default gateway in Seeded scan, the discovered device set expands out to include all devices and conversations known to the gateway up to the Scan Depth ("hops" away from the initial target IP).

Discovery returns a view or list of candidate devices it found. You can review, filter, and select devices from this list for comprehensive management (monitoring, alerting, reporting and more) with WhatsUp Gold.

Tip: You can copy/edit/manage a scan profile in DISCOVER > Saved Scan Settings. For details, or to learn how to apply a scan based on an already created profile, see Using Saved Discovery Scan Settings.