<IM(ns)HO>
- - - - - clip and save! - - - - - - -
Discovery is an amazingly useful technique. But it is NOT a useful technique for the realm of Monitoring and Automation. But that's a mistake LOTS of people make.
My experience is that onboarding works best when you treat it like a paid service. The only things that get monitored are the things the customer pays for. That goes for devices, elements, applications, etc.
Yes, that requires teams to pro-actively TELL you about a new device, or a drive they've added, or whatever. But you avoid the whole "can't you just discover (rediscover, auto-update) everything" conundrum that ends up burying many a monitoring installation.
Now "TELLING" you can come in many forms - a report that shows new records in the CMDB is one way. Copying the monitoring team on new build requests. Giving permission to members of other teams to add new devices, and then creating a report when devices come online but are missing key custom fields. There are ways to manage this workflow.
And what you end up with is the list of monitored systems you WANT, without a bunch of things that nobody cares about.
Off the side, you can have your laptop running Solarwinds Engineer's Toolkit doing mass discoveries, and then programatically comparing that discovery to the things in the SolarWinds db. But that's audit and discovery, NOT monitoring.
- - - - - clip and save! - - - - - - -
</SOAPBOX>