GatherNetworkInventory

Overview

The Unified Assurance Topology Gather Network Inventory application gathers information about the network from devices in the device catalog using SNMP and enters it into inventory tables. This information is also used to create topology layout in the graph database. The following types of information will be discovered by default:

• ARP entries

• Bridge ports

• CDP neighbors

• Cisco VLANs

• Interfaces

• IP addresses

• LLDP neighbors

• MAC addresses

• Ports

• Routes

• Trunks

Gather Network Inventory Setup

1. Devices must exist in the Device Catalog for this application to be able to function. Devices can be created in several different ways:

   1. Using the Device Auto Discovery application.

   2. Using the Manual Discovery UI:

      Configuration -> Device Discovery -> Manual Discovery

   3. Manually entering all values using the Devices UI:

      Configuration -> Device Catalog -> Devices

2. Devices must by SNMP discovered for this application to be able to get data from the devices. See the Device SNMP Discovery application for additional information.

3. Enable the default Job, unless a specific configuration option is needed.

   Configuration -> Broker Control -> Jobs

Default Scheduled Job

Default Configuration

Best Practices

The following list shows you best practices for gathering network inventory.

• The Topology Gather Network Inventory job is configured to run at 11:00 am every day.

• Some devices with high interface counts can have trouble returning usable inventory data to the application using the default get-bulk SNMP request method. While the application may fall back to a get-next request, it slows down the discovery as it has to make multiple requests for the same data from the device. The following warning indicates issues with using get-bulk SNMP requests for a device:

  [WARN] abc.example.com(xxx) [Interface Names]: "No Values Returned [The message size exceeded the buffer maxMsgSize of xxx]"
  

  To optimize the gather for these high interface count devices, add the following MetaTag to the device to indicate the application should use get-next SNMP requests to obtain the data more reliably:

  Type: SNMP, Value: ForceGetNext
  

Administration Details

The following list shows the technical details you will need for advanced administration of the application:

• Package - coreCollection-app

• Synopsis - ./GatherNetworkInventory [OPTIONS]

• Options

   -c, --AppConfigID N   Application Config ID (Service, Job, or Request ID)
   -d, --DeviceID N      DeviceID (Optional)
   -?, -h, --Help        Print usage and exit
  

• Threaded - Multithreaded