Network Discovery Changes under the Hood

Network Discovery Changes under the hoodDear JDisc friends,

apart from the major changes and shiny new features, we are constantly adding new smaller enhancements and features to our product. Of course, all of them appear within the release notes. But honestly, who’s reading release notes? I don’t :-). Most of the time, they are pretty boring to read and unfortunately, ours is no exception to this regard :-(. If you have ideas on how to create a more appealing format for them just let us know!

Therefore, I use our blog from time to time in order to highlight some of the changes that might not be obvious at first sight. So this blog is about all the little nice new features that you don’t recognize at first sight.

1. New SNMP Device
Did you know that added support for more than 40 new SNMP-based network devices within the last couple of months? Most of the information came from our customers and that is a good example of how we collaborate with customers in order to satisfy their requirements and on the other side improve our product. That’s what I call a win-win situation (Bingo 🙂 )

2. Custom Report Improvements
Customers like our custom reports, because they can extract the information in exactly the format they need. Therefore, we are constantly adding new selectable fields and new comparison operators. For instance, recently, we added the feature to check fields within custom reports that

  • do not match a regular expression
  • do not contain a string
  • do not contain a string (case insensitive comparison)
  • do not match wild patterns (? and *)

So far the negation of contains and matches was not possible.

3. VMware Storage Location
One of our customers was stating that it is essential for him to know which file systems on VMware servers reside locally or remotely. If a file system resides remotely, then he needed the information on which NAS hosts the storage. It turned out, that this feature was pretty trivial to implement and we simply added a new “Location” field for the logical disks.

4. Database Port Discovery
We implemented another important improvement for the database discovery. First, we added the capability to scan MySQL database servers. Additionally, we enhanced our database discovery for MySQL and Oracle to identify the port on which a database instance is running.

5. Device Deletion Log and Aging-Out
One of our recent updates included our new aging-out mechanism. Devices that could not be scanned for a configurable amount of time get deleted automatically from the database. This helps to get rid of devices that are no longer part of the IT environment.

Additionally, JDisc Discovery keeps track of deleted devices. A new report lists all deleted devices together with an optional comment about the reason for the deletion process.

6. And of course bug fixes…
As with any software, also JDisc has bugs. Our philosophy in dealing with bugs is to resolve them as soon as possible and then release them as quickly as possible. Our agile release strategy helps us to quickly upload new releases with important bug fixes to our web page.

So keep me posted. There are more nice little features to come! And one exciting new major feature!

Cheers,
Thomas

About The Author

Thomas Trenz
I own and manage JDisc and its network inventory and discovery products. Before I started JDisc, I worked quite a long time for Hewlett-Packard developing software for network assessments and inventory projects. Feel free to contact me on Linked-In or Xing.

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