Asset discovery

Asset discovery enables you to gather a list of all available devices on a network. You perform an asset discovery when you have a new network or customer to monitor or to find any new devices at a customer site.

Asset discovery also collects the following information on the properties of a device:

Memory Application CIM Service
Computer System Processor Motherboard
Operating System DotNet Version Battery
Network Adapter Configuration Page File Port
Network Adapter Mapped Drive Printer
Media Access Device Patch BIOS
Folder For Share Video Controller Logical Device

To perform an asset discovery, create a discovery job to scan the customer network. Servers, workstations, laptops, printers and switches will be imported automatically into N-able N-central. Devices that are detected as "Other" will have to be imported manually.

Asset discovery is carried out automatically for devices with Windows agents during the installation or upgrade of N-able N-central without any discovery jobs being added or initiated.

A discovery job can be in one of the following states:

  • Pending: The job has not yet been retrieved by the probe. The discovery job may be modified in this state.
  • In Progress: The job has been retrieved by the probe but has not been completed. You cannot edit the discovery job in this state.
  • Completed: The probe successfully retrieved and completed the discovery job.
  • Failed: The probe successfully retrieved the discovery job but could not complete it. A possible reason may be that invalid data was provided.
  • Expired: The job reached its expiration date and time before it was completed. The default expiration is 24 hours from when the discovery job was added.

To run an asset discovery job, you need to deploy a probe in the customer environment.

Probe-based discovery jobs cannot find a full list of asset data on Mac devices, so Mac device should not be part of recurring asset jobs if you are expecting asset data. After discovering Mac devices, allow the Mac agent to provide the asset data based on its daily asset scan.

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