Vendor attribute is empty for ICMPONLY devices

Products

• VMware Smart Assurance
• Network Observability

Issue/Introduction

This article covers the use-case where Vendor attribute is reported empty for ICMPONLY discovered devices

Environment

All Supported Smarts releases

Cause

As the vendor information is populated via the SysObjectID based device certification (which is checked only in case of SNMP based communication), this check is not performed for ICMPONLY devices.

Resolution

Smarts is working as per the design.

When ICMPONLY is selected, discovery does not send SNMP polls to the system and cannot, therefore discover the system and its components.
Instead, the system is added to the modeled topology as a Host, and the system’s SNMP agent is added to the topology as an SNMPAgent. The host is monitored only for connectivity by sending ICMP polls to the host.

Note the following:

• Even if an ICMPONLY system does not have an SNMP agent, an SNMPAgent object is created for the system. The SysObjectID attribute of the SNMPAgent object is empty.
• When an ICMPONLY system has multiple IP (v4 or v6) addresses that resolve to the same name, all IP addresses are retained. You must manually delete any IP address that no longer belongs to the ICMPONLY system.

Additional Information

Options to manually edit these for SNMP enabled and discovered devices is available at: Changing 'Vendor' attribute value for certified devices in IP domains