Chapter 3: Managing Your Network Assets; Creating A Network Component Inventory; Using Discovery To Find Network Devices - Extreme Networks EPICenter Guide Manual

3 Managing your Network Assets
This chapter describes how to manage and monitor your network assets. Topics include:
Creating a complete network component inventory
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Importing inventory information using command line utilities
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Using Device Groups to organize and manage inventory
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Using Port Groups for monitoring critical network links
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Uploading inventory information to Extreme for service and support
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Using Reports to view your device inventory
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Creating a Network Component Inventory

There are several ways you can create an inventory of your network components:
Use the EPICenter Discovery feature to automatically discover the devices on your network. YOu
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can then determine which devices to add, setting contact information for them as you do so.
Add devices individually using the Add Devices and Device Groups dialog in the Inventory
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Manager
Add devices to the inventory using a command line script
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You may also want to create in advance a set of Device Groups so that you can assign the devices to the
appropriate Device Groups as you add them. Or, you can add your devices initially into the Default
Device Group, and then easily assign them to different device groups later.

Using Discovery to Find Network Devices

Using the Inventory Manager's Discovery feature lets you find all the devices on your network that are
running SNMP agents. Once the devices have been discovered, you can then add them to the EPICenter
inventory database, providing device contact information and assigning them to device groups as you
add them. Thus, using Discovery you can configure and organize your device inventory in a single
process.
You can tailor the discovery process to control the types of devices it will discover:
You can restrict the discovery to only Extreme devices (the default) or have it discover all MIB-2
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compatible devices.
You can restrict the discovery to devices running SNMPv1 (the default) or allow it to discover
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devices running SNMPv3 as well.
You can also control the range of IP addresses over which EPICenter will try to discover the devices it
can manage:
You can specify a single address or subnet specification, using wildcard characters as needed
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You can specify the start and end addresses of a range of IP addresses
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You can also use a subnet mask to modify the range of addresses to be searched.
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