GatherNetworkInventory

The Oracle Communications 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

You can run this application as a scheduled job using the Jobs UI.

Gather Network Inventory Setup

1. Discover or create devices in the Device Catalog. You can use auto discovery, manual discovery, or manually enter device information.

   See Discovering Devices for information about auto and manual discovery, and Device Auto Discovery and Manual Discovery in Unified Assurance User's Guide for information about the discovery applications.

   See Devices in Unified Assurance User's Guide for information about using the Devices UI to manually enter device information.

2. Run the Device SNMP Discovery job so that the Gather Network Inventory job can get data from the devices. See Device SNMP Discovery for more information.

3. Enable the default Gather Network Inventory job, unless you need to set specific configuration options. See Jobs in Unified Assurance User's Guide for information about using the Jobs UI.

Default Scheduled Job

The following table shows the settings for the default job. Actual values are in bold, descriptions of values are in plaintext.

See Jobs in Unified Assurance User's Guide for general information about the settings for jobs.

See Using Application Primary/Backup Failover for more information about the different failover types.

Default Configuration

The following table shows the default configurations for the application. Actual values are in bold, descriptions of values are in plaintext.

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

• Package: ./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