Discovery Scheduling

Important:The product name for this user guide has changed from Foundation and Cloudscape to Business Service Discovery and Migration Planning.

Note:All times used in the Discovery Scheduling feature use the UTC time zone, including the calendar views and the time of day for scheduled scans.

Regularly doing a discovery on an environment captures any changes (new servers or VMs stood up or spun down).

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Scheduling a Discovery Scan

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Scanning Behavior

Scheduling a Discovery Scan

The Discovery Scheduling feature becomes available after the initial scan of the environment has been requested. Following the initial scan, the Schedule Rescans button will appear next to the Request Rescan button at the bottom of the RN150 Dashboard page.

Selecting the Schedule Rescans button will open the Discovery Scheduler page. This page provides a calendar view of the current month showing the currently scheduled Discoveries. You can go forwards and backwards through months of the year using the < and > buttons on the top right of the calendar view. The Today button will go back to the current month with the current day highlighted.

Selecting the + Add button will open a dialog box for scheduling a new Discovery scan. You can modify any existing scheduled Discovery scan by clicking on an entry shown in the calendar.

Scanning Behavior

Note:When the appliance is in discovery mode it IS NOT collecting performance data. To maintain appropriate balance between performance collection and discovery we recommend scheduling discoveries no more frequent than once every couple of days. Often a weekly schedule may be optimal.

A scheduled scan acts exactly the same as if the Request Rescan button had been selected from the RN150 Appliance Dashboard. The scan is requested at the time it was scheduled, and will begin running up to several minutes later. An email notification will be sent when the scan starts, and when the scan has completed and updated Assets information is available in the Portal or FlexDeploy Appliance. Scheduled scans always use the behavior as if the View Inventory Changes feature had been selected, which will refresh the data for Assets that have previously been inventoried as well as discovering any new devices. Note that the subnet scope used during a scheduled scan reflects the currently selected subnet entries in the RN150 Subnets page at the the scan is initiated.

If the RN150 Appliance does not have connectivity with the RISC Networks NOC (referred to as being “offline”) at the time the scan is scheduled, the scan will not be initiated and the RN150 Appliance will not attempt to run any scheduled scans that were missed when connectivity is resumed.

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Adding A New Scheduled Discovery Scan

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Updating An Existing Scheduled Discovery Scan

Adding A New Scheduled Discovery Scan

You can add a new Discovery scan to the schedule by completing the following steps.

To add a new Discovery scan to the schedule:

In the upper-right corner of the calendar, select + Add to open the Schedule A Discovery dialog box.

Select the Run Date to open a calendar and select the desired day to request the scan. A Discovery cannot be scheduled in the past, so days prior to the current day, and months prior to the current month, cannot be selected.

Select the time of day to request the scan in the UTC time zone. The minutes field shows a range of times in 15 minute increments. A range is shown to indicate the asynchronous nature of scan requests. The scan will be requested at the beginning of the time range (for instance, if the 30-45 minute range is selected, the scan will be requested at the 30th minute of the hour, but the scan will actually begin running up to several minutes later).

Select either a single or a repeat Discovery scan.

To schedule a single Discovery scan, leave the Repeat Every field at the default value of 0.

To schedule a routine, recurring scan, set the Repeat Every value to the number of days between requests. For instance, to request a weekly rescan on the same day of the week, set the Repeat Every value to 7. The selected hour and minute of the day is used for each scan request initiated in the series.

Select Add to complete the configuration and add the new scan(s) to the schedule. The new scans will now appear in the calendar view on the page. The Cancel button can be selected at any time before selecting Add to quit configuration, which will not add the scan(s) to the schedule.

Updating An Existing Scheduled Discovery Scan

Note:Scheduled scans that have already occurred cannot be modified.

You can update an existing scheduled Discovery scan by completing the following steps.

To update an existing scheduled Discovery scan:

From the main calendar view, select the calendar entry that you would like to change. The Edit A Scheduled Discovery dialog box opens.

Update the necessary parameters of the scheduled scan such as the day, time of day, and recurrence.

Note:When editing a scheduled scan that is part of a recurring series (the Repeat Every value is greater than zero), any changes made to a scheduled scan in the series operates on the series as a whole. If you change the time of day on any element of the series, the time of day is changed for all subsequent scans. If you change the Repeat Every recurrence value, the interval between all scans in the series (beginning from the original scan in the series) is changed. If you select Delete, all entries as part of that series are removed.

To finalize any scheduling changes, select Update.

To permanently remove the scan from the schedule, select Delete.

To close the dialog box without making any changes to the schedule, selecting Cancel.