Discover Devices

Discovery is the quickest way to onboard a site. You give the agent a few IP ranges and the community strings to try, and it scans them, finds the devices that answer SNMP, and starts monitoring them automatically. For a handful of known addresses, Add SNMP devices is the more direct route.

Before you start

• A Linux or Docker KloudMate Agent with network access to the ranges you want to scan. Kubernetes agents can’t run discovery.
• The v1/v2c community strings the devices use. Discovery tries these against every address in range.

Caution

Discovery credentials are v1/v2c only. To monitor a device that requires SNMPv3, add it directly with the SNMP wizard.

Add a scan

On the Network page, open the Add menu and choose Discover devices. Fill in the scan:

• Ranges to scan: one CIDR or range per line (or comma-separated), for example 10.0.0.0/24 or 10.0.1.1-50.
• Candidate communities: the v1/v2c community strings to try, such as public, private. These are sent as plain text and used only for discovery.
• Version: v2c or v1.
• Scan interval: how often to re-scan, for example 1h.
• Port: the SNMP port to probe, 161 by default.

You can add several scans on one agent, each with different ranges, ports, or communities, and the agent runs each on its own interval and combines the results.

What happens next

Every device a scan finds is monitored automatically, using the community that answered it. The agent applies its updated configuration to start polling, which briefly restarts data collection on that agent. It only restarts when the set of monitored devices actually changes, so a steady scan that keeps finding the same devices does nothing.

Caution

A single scan monitors up to 256 devices. Point scans at focused ranges rather than an entire /16, or a large range will leave some devices unmonitored.

The Discovered devices panel lists what the scans found: address, name, vendor, description, and whether each is reachable. Results appear after the next scan interval, and Refresh reloads them. Monitored devices also show up on the All devices tab like any other SNMP device.

Adjust what’s monitored

Discovery is sticky. A device stays monitored even if a later scan misses it once, so a brief blip doesn’t make it vanish. Instead it reports Down, which is the accurate state. To stop monitoring devices, narrow or remove the range that covers them (or delete the scan) from Configure. The agent then re-accumulates from the ranges that remain. See Manage and troubleshoot.