Manual probing

After you have properly installed and configured OTbase Asset Discovery, little happens -- except for some entries that you may see spontaneously pop up in the device table. These entries originate from ARP requests by those devices that fly by Asset Discovery and are captured because, why not -- it's a starting point for getting an idea what is in a particular network.

Nevertheless the real action only begins when a probe is initiated explicitly. In a probe, Asset Discovery probes a single network, an individual device, or multiple networks -- depending on how the probe was initiated.

Manual probes are mostly used for verifying that your probing configuration is correct, and for assessing if OTbase fits your needs using the evaluation version. A special case is if you use a laptop to gather configuration data from isolated networks that will then be imported into OTbase Asset Center; in this case you also issue a manual probe after you have connected your laptop to the target network.

Probing always starts with determining the IP addresses of devices in the given network, if you have ARP, ICMP, or both enabled. If neither of these protocols is enabled, you won't get much out of a probe, except for devices who are already in the device list (because Asset Discovery saw ARP requests from these devices, or because the network had been probed previously with ARP/ICMP on).

Then, for each discovered IP address in the network, further configuration details are probed using the protocols configured for the network or individual device.

You can follow the probing progress as the device table is updated live. Note however that probing large networks can take a while -- especially in routed networks where you have to use ICMP or Ethernet/IP. You can check that the probe is complete when the number of running tasks that is displayed in the status bar at the bottom of the window is zero.

Probing a single network

In order to probe a specific network, select that network in the discovery table with left-click and click the "Probe" button.

Probing multiple networks

You can probe multiple networks with one click if you first set the "Export" flag for desired networks, then select the discovery node, and click "Probe".

Probing individual devices

You can probe individual devices by selecting one or more devices with left-click and then launch the context menu with right-click. From the context menu, select "refresh using detected protocols" or "probe using configured protocols".