Because the creation of objects and relationships for the discovered devices, their internal components, and their connections is time-consuming, the initial discovery is usually the most time-consuming and expensive in terms of network resources. Also, due to network variance, the duration of the initial discovery is virtually impossible to predict.

For these reasons, schedule the initial discovery over a long period of low utilization, such as a weekend or holiday. Use this scheduling even if the IP Manager is deployed in a test environment because discovery can be adversely affected by heavy network utilization.

Other than scheduling, the most basic choice in the discovery design is whether to use manual discovery with autodiscovery or manual discovery without autodiscovery. Manual discovery without autodiscovery requires a comprehensive seed file.