Thu Nov 13, 2014 5:53 pm
The dude is an snmp probe it will ask a device directly and make a best guess at what the device is like a router or a switch. Also it has auto discovery which will sweep the network by range of ip addresses and determine if certain services are available, if a match is made it will automatically classify that device as predicted. So if you sweep a range of ip addresses and one device responds on port 80 it will probably decide that it is a web server and if another device responds on port 21 it would decide that the server is an ftp server. This is all completely configurable so you can auto discover a ups by building a custom probe that finds a specific oid or port and classify on that.
With all that said I do not use auto discover. I have manually built most things but keep in mind you can automate probe installation after manually adding a device by "discovering" that individual device and you can fine tune which probes get installed on which devices so this is fast enough with out having auto discover change the layout or find things I don't care about.
HTH,
Lebowski