About Active Discovery

With Active Discovery, you can schedule WhatsUp Gold to scan your network for new monitors (Active Monitors and Performance Monitors) and devices on a regular basis. Newly discovered items are added to the Active Discovery Results report, and WhatsUp Gold notifies you that a new device was found, or a new monitor was found on an existing device. You can then review the report and select the items you want to add to your device list.

Active Discovery works with two types of device discovery:

• SNMP SmartScan. WhatsUp Gold discovers devices by reading SNMP information on your network. This scan type uses an SNMP enabled router to identify the devices in your network and also identifies subnetworks within your network.
• IP Range Scan. WhatsUp Gold scans a range of IP addresses and finds the devices that respond to a message sent via the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP).

If the scan finds results, an email is generated and sent to the address you provide during Active Discovery configuration. The email contains links to the reports that are populated by the scan:

• Active Discovery Log report shows the success or failure of the Active Discovery task, and any devices and/or Monitors found during that scan.
• Active Discovery Results report shows all new items found in the latest scan, or all unprocessed items from previous scans. Through this report, you can add devices to the device list and new monitors (Active Monitors and Performance Monitors) to the device monitors.

If an email notification is not specified (in the wizard), these reports are also available in the System report list, in the Report view.