PRTG Manual: Discovery Tasks
When a network discovery is running, UVexplorer performs many concurrent activities in order to find devices on the network and collect detailed information about them. Some devices are quite simple and can be discovered quickly. Other devices are complex, and more time is needed to discover everything about them. While discovery is going on, you might have questions such
as:
▪How close is the discovery to being done?
▪What devices are being discovered right now?
▪What information about each device is currently being discovered?
These questions are even more relevant when a discovery is taking longer than you expect, and you want to know what is taking so long.
In order to help answer these questions, the Discovery Tasks form displays detailed information about exactly what tasks a discovery is currently working on. It is useful for determining what devices are currently being discovered, what information is being collected from those devices, and why the discovery has not yet completed. It also allows discovery tasks to be individually canceled, which can be useful if discovery gets stuck on a badly-behaving device.
When the Discovery Task form is opened, it automatically populates the form with information about all discovery tasks that are currently in progress. Typically, each task listed represents a single IP address that UVexplorer is attempting to communicate with. The following properties are displayed for each discovery task:
This field displays the IP address that the discovery task is attempting to communicate with. If there is no device with the specified IP address, the communication will fail, and the discovery task will determine that no such device exists. If, however, there is a device with the specified IP address, the discovery task will collect all the information it can about the device before it completes.
This field displays the discovery task’s type. Discovery involves several different types of tasks that collect different types of data. Possible values for this field include:
▪IpDiscoveryTask – This task determines whether there is a device with a specific IP address, and collects some basic information about the device.
▪ResolveHostnamesTask – This task determines the host names for each device by doing a reverse DNS lookup for each discovered IP address.
▪DetailedDiscoveryTask – This task collects in-depth, detailed information about the device with a specific IP address.
This field displays the amount of time for which the discovery task has been running. The format is HH:MM:SS.
This field displays detailed information about what the discovery task is currently doing. For some task types this field is empty.
Clicking the Refresh Display button will update the discovery task information in the form.
Clicking the Cancel Selected button will cancel each discovery task that that is selected in the form. This allows you to selectively cancel the discovery of devices that are taking too long to finish. When a task is canceled, it can take several seconds before it actually terminates.
Clicking the Close button will close the Discovery Tasks form.
