Smarts IP: Can Smarts IP discover a device without pinging it?

Products

• VMware Smart Assurance

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:


Can Smarts IP discover a device without pinging it?

Can Smarts IP discover a device but also prevent it from being pinged?

Can Smarts IP discover a device that has ping disabled?

Environment

VMware Smart Assurance - SMARTS

Resolution

To have Smarts IP discover a device but also prevent it from being pinged, do the following (see Note statements):

1. Delete the device from the topology. 
2. Rediscover the device, either by importing from a seed file or using the Add Agent function. For the discovery, specify ACCESSMODE set to SNMPONLY. 

Setting ACCESSMODE to SNMPONLY will prevent the device from being pinged, and only SNMP will be polled during the device's discovery and for subsequent Availability and Performance monitoring.

Additional Information

In practice, for security reasons, some devices such as Windows domain controllers may have ICMP ping disabled. If such devices are discovered with both ICMP and SNMP access modes, then they will be declared as down when ping fails during discovery.
For more details regarding discovery, polling and Access Modes, please refer to the EMC Smarts IP Management Suite Discovery Guide document which can be found in the <BASEDIR>\IP\smarts\doc\pdf of the Smarts IP Suite installation.