Configuring the Scope of Network Discovery

There are two ways to specify the range of devices discovered during a discovery session:

• Specify one or more IP address/subnet mask pairs, and discover devices on those subnets.
• Specify a seed router and a number of hops, and discover devices within the specified number of hops from the seed router. A hop is the trip a data packet takes from one router or intermediate device to another within a network. If a packet travels from a source computer to a router to a second router to a destination computer, it has taken one hop.

The list of discovered devices is affected by the following:

• The location selected for the discovery session.
• The device types to include or exclude from the final list of discovered devices.

Example: Configuring Discovery Scope

The following figure shows a sample network that includes three subnets, each of which is connected to a router. All three subnets are part of the same location, which contains only one DGE, in Subnet A.

Sample Network Configuration for Traverse Discovery

Example 1

The superuser configures discovery by specifying two IP Address/subnet pairs:

• 198.168.2.0/255.255.255.0
• 198.168.3.0/255.255.255.0

Discovery finds all of the devices on Subnet B and Subnet C.

Example 2

The superuser configures discovery by specifying the IP address of Router A, 192.168.1.14, and a maximum of two hops. The result is that devices in all three subnets are discovered, because Router B and Router C are both within two hops of Router A, and devices within the subnets that are connected to the routers fall within the discovery scope.