TECHNICAL DATA

NETWORK DISCOVERY

ENA delivers automated network discovery so you can see every device under management for complete data analytics.

Greater control over your network environment

Entuity understands that networks are dynamic, not static, with physical and virtual IT assets inside and outside the enterprise. That’s why we’ve designed ENA so you can rapidly adapt to changing requirements and advancing technology. Install as many devices as you like to your network without worrying about how they’ll integrate into the network – use ENA to rapidly discover, add and configure these devices, and support your modern infrastructure and the applications that run on them.

Apply management settings to as many devices as you see fit, all at the same time, to save the individual effort. Automatically discover knowledge of network layers 2 and 3, and monitor layer 4 application services. This is the basis for thoroughly analyzing the data and delivering actionable information and extensive reporting capabilities, so you can keep your network performing to the standard your business demands.

Do you have multiple clients or dependencies, or distributed locations each with their own local networks? Create and run discovery on multiple Auto Discovery profiles, each with their own unique settings, allowing you to specify individual clients or network areas to which you want to discover and take under management new network devices.

 

A single place for your device administration

ENA fully consolidates all core network management functionality into one solution, with a single user interface. It is unified with the rest of the product, feeding into all other ENA functionality. We’ve put all device management and administration options together on the Device Inventory page, where you can discover, import and add devices, modify the attributes used to manage them, or remove them from management.

Access is permission-based, so you can specify who can edit device management. You need a tool that does more than simply pinging a device to determine its status – ENA gives you quick accessibility and deep visibility into your network devices.

View important information about each device at a glance from the Device Inventory page:

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Device name displayed in the interface.
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Polled name.

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Zone to which the device belongs.

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Description.

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Physical location.

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Capabilities, e.g. routing, routing and switching, none, unknown.
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Type, e.g. router, VM platform.
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Management level.
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IP protocol.

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SysOID used to manage the device.

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SNMP version supported by the device.
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Port on which the device’s SNMP agent receives its requests.
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If the device is certified or uncertified.
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If the device is reachable by ping.
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If the device is under management.
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Source of the device name.
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Device’s management IP address.

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If SNMP Bulk Get is enabled.

Easily navigate to your desired dashboards

From the Device Inventory page, you can navigate to all available dashboards for any selected device. Sensibly displaying data about the selected object, dashboards provide multiple functionality options and object context menus.

Continual, automated device discovery

Rapid discovery and onboarding of new devices is essential in a growing business, or for an MSP adding new customers and users to an already extensive customer list. With ENA, you have a range of options when it comes to quickly discovering and adding devices to your network. You might have thousands of devices on your network, but you certainly don’t have time to manually discover each and every one, and there’s no guarantee that you will find all of them, either.

Network device auto discovery

ENA’s automated Auto Discovery tool saves you time that could be better spent elsewhere on the network, and gives you peace of mind that everything on your network is accounted for. Complete deployments in a streamlined manner, and gain visibility of new devices straight away to avoid costly information gaps and performance-affecting faults arising through obsolete inventory information.

Specify parameters from UI or the command line

Utilize Auto Discovery from either the UI or the command line, depending on your preference. This powerful tool enables you to specify the parameters of automated discovery to ensure that ENA will discover the devices that you need. Specify the device, IP address range and/or IP subnets for Auto Discovery to use when identifying devices for ENA to take under management, and exclude any address ranges or SysOIDs that you don’t want to be included in the search. The devices found by this method can be automatically added to your inventory and taken under management, or left in a queue for you to review as you wish and then added to your inventory at the click of a button.

Continually updated device visibility

As devices are added, removed or changed on the network, details are captured and stored in the ENA CMDB, giving you the unique historical context of your network. With this continually updated visibility, you can avoid annual maintenance costs on devices that you otherwise might not have known were no longer in service.

Find objects that should not be there

Another benefit of automating discovery is the ability to find objects that should not be on your network. These might otherwise go unnoticed, because you did not intend for them to be added, and saves you the effort of manually checking the network for such illegal devices or not even discovering them at all. Such rogue devices might represent a security risk or could have been installed without permission.

Schedule discovery to suit your business

Further automate the process by scheduling Auto Discovery to run at set times. Run discovery as regularly as you need to make sure that your device inventory is continually updated and accurately reflects the rapidly changing heterogeneous network environment.

Import devices from device files

ENA further allows you to import devices from device files. These can be imported in the SNMPv1, v2c and v3 formats. Or you can add a custom device type that represents a device ENA is not managing, but you want to be represented within ENA. The flexibility available across our solution starts with helping you discover every device and stay up-to-date across your network.

Streamline discovery for individual sites and clients

From ENA v17.0 P05 upwards, you can use individual Auto Discovery profiles to discover and take under management devices for each of your individual clients, customers or network sites.

Each Auto Discovery profile can be configured to exactly match the requirements of the office or location that the profile represents, and you can specify a View to which discovered devices for that profile will be added. When you add a customer, you can configure their Auto Discovery profile to store customer name, subnets (or a list of IPs), schedule, authentication information and discovery options.

Device and vendor agnostic

As it grows, your business will integrate into the network a host of device types from different vendors. ENA discovers, manages and monitors a wide range of network-attached device types and metrics, covering your existing network and additions that you will want to make. Discover and monitor, amongst other objects and metrics:

  • Physical servers
  • Virtual servers
  • Storage
  • Ports
  • Modules
  • Memory pools
  • Processors
  • Power supply units
  • Cooling fans
  • Temperature
  • Airflow
  • Voltage
  • VLANs
  • Port-to-port connectivity
  • Virtual switches
  • Hypervisors
  • Virtual machines; and more.

ENA breaks down device types into the following categories:

  • Autonomous WAP
  • Base Station
  • Blade Center
  • Custom Device
  • Ethernet Switch
  • Firewall
  • Load Balancer
  • Managed Host
  • Matrix Switch
  • Multiplexer
  • PoE Midspan Injector
  • Router
  • SSL Proxy
  • Uninterruptible Power Supply
  • VM Platform
  • VPN
  • Wide Area Application Service
  • Wireless Controller

ENA was designed from the ground up to support mixed, multi-vendor environments, and is already . We support hundreds of vendors and thousands of devices, new revisions and new models. Please find here a list of the vendors we currently support. Further, the solution offers rapid adaptation and extension for new manufacturers, and this is especially applicable to new or updated SNMP MIBs. New vendors and updates can be accommodated and certified within a few hours either by ENA Support.

Fast and flexible management options

Every device under ENA management is managed according to its specified management level. We offer six levels of management that you can apply to devices individually or in bulk as you see fit:

Full

Fully manages the device and all its interfaces.

Full Management (No Ports)

Fully manages the device but does not maintain any port level information.

Basic

Collects only basic system information and the full IP address table via SNMP. This management level is used when ENA does not have the appropriate vendor file, cannot generate an appropriate file or you only want the device placed under basic management.

Full (Mgmt Port Only)

Fully manages the device but only manages the management interface.

Ping Only

Does not collect SNMP data for these devices. It only reports whether these devices respond to ICMP ping.

None

Does not manage the device. None is only available with the Custom Device device type, which is used to represent devices in ENA that are not managed by ENA.

Follow how the network has changed

Keeping tabs on what is present and happening on your network is vital to delivering expected business services. So, too, is having knowledge of how the network has changed over specified periods of time. ENA’s snapshot functionality allows you to manually create or schedule snapshots of your network’s device inventory (on a View basis, not for the entire inventory), which can then be used in reports that compare any two of these snapshots and identify the changes between the two. Schedule both snapshots and reporting to remove manual labour from the process of keeping tabs on how your network is changing in an increasingly dynamic environment.

Modify the attributes used to manage a device

Because business and the underlying network are dynamic, there will be occasions when you may want to modify these attributes. Or a device might be successfully polled only intermittently. Or a managed device has been replaced and the new device has inherited the old IP address. With ENA, it’s easy to modify the attributes used to manage a device and tailor the network how you want to.

ENA uses the following attributes to manage devices, depending upon the management level:

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Management level

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Device type

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Polled name/IP address

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Display name

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IP protocol

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SNMP version

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SNMP Bulk Get

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Read community

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Write community

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SNMP port (UDP)

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Timeout

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Retry number

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Max packet size

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Connection user

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Connection password

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Connection URL

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CLI access method (SSH or Telnet)

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CLI access port

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CLI access username

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CLI access password 1

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CLI access password 2

Comprehensive data collection

ENA knows in advance what data to seek, and so provides you with the quality of data to accompany its quantity. Data collection, analysis and delivery to the UI is controlled by the Data Management Kernel (DMK), which provides out-of-the-box the customizable data models that define the attributes of each different managed object type. Different types of monitored object will require the collection of different metrics, giving you the data that will mean something to you and your business. Armed with multiple types of management data, you can look at issues through multiple lenses and viewpoints, all within the same management system.

The unified nature of the ENA solution means that datasets are not just exhaustive, but also seamlessly available to all functionality within the solution. The data scheme of each database embedded in the Entuity servers is identical, which allows for distributed data processing and optimized in/out load across servers. Multiple databases are presented as a single, logical and global database that can be accessed from any server. By distributing the data collection workload, ENA improves efficiency and scalability to deliver timely and accurate data.

Therefore, you won’t need to spend time worrying about and arbitrating between independent datasets, because there are no independent datasets – there are no discrepancies in accuracy, time or quantity between different functionalities. All data is perfectly synced across the entire product, enabling the powerful ENA dashboarding system to deliver seamless, flexible and dynamic insight into any part of your network and at any level of granularity. Comprehensive network discovery, management and data collection provide you with all the tools and capability to validate network service beyond a simplistic and insufficient red/green light methodology.

Comprehensive data collection

The DMK controls:

data delivery

which accommodates real-time requirements of the user interfaces and aligns them with long-term data retention requirements.

data export

which integrates network metrics into third-party vendor solutions for a unified management platform.

ENA database schema

which is built and maintained automatically to align with, add, or augment device-specific data models.

data gathering frequency

based on requirements for each type of data for each type of managed element.

data retrieval

by pulling stored data, then processing and passing it to the reporting engine

data lifecycle management

which rolls up and ages data based on retention requirements for each type of statistic.

device-specific data gathering methods

such as SNMP polling, SNMP traps, syslog events, TCP port probing, vendor-specific APIs.

SNMP support

When adding new devices, ENA supports the following SNMP versions:

v1

v2c

v3

The recommendation in ENA is to use SNMPv3 if it is configured on the device, or SNMPv2c otherwise. In cases where the SNMP agent in a device lacks support for VLANs (which is a known limitation in several device agents, including Cisco), you can use ENA to configure SNMPv3 Cisco devices to provide VLAN information using SNMPv3 contexts.

Cover all bases with custom polling

 

Each business has its own needs and requirements, and sometimes you need to tweak the out-of-the-box offering to meet certain demands and cover your entire network. ENA’s customizability enables you to define your own custom rules on how to poll new MIB variables from an SNMP device, as best suits your business. This is achieved through User Defined Polling. You have the freedom to add as many new attributes and collectors as you need without any network downtime, and all changes take effect as soon as they are defined. Make the changes you need to make in real time.

Defining and customizing additional attributes that can be polled from both system and user defined managed objects is possible by creating User Defined Attributes. Further enhance the suitability of your user defined attributes by creating your own custom thresholds for them, and in so doing giving you the greatest possible insight into the risk of performance issues on your custom devices. Creating your own user defined collector is useful in cases when the ENA collectors are not collecting data on certain device attributes available from the device vendor’s MIB.

Access remote terminal from the UI

In a dynamic network, you need to be able to configure your devices at a moment’s notice, wherever you are and wherever they are. Use ENA to access SSH or Telnet remote terminal sessions for any managed device on your network. Gain remote terminal access into the device’s command line interfaces directly from the UI. From here, you can remotely configure devices as you need.

Track inventory changes

Keeping tabs on what is present and happening on your network is vital to delivering expected business services. So, too, is having knowledge of how the network has changed over specified periods of time. ENA’s snapshot functionality allows you to manually create or schedule snapshots of your network’s device inventory (on a View basis, not for the entire inventory), which can then be used in reports that compare any two of these snapshots and identify the changes between the two. Schedule both snapshots and reporting to remove manual labour from the process of keeping tabs on how your network is changing in an increasingly dynamic environment.