Smart Assurance IP Availability and Performance Manager discovers domain-specific entities related to the features of Cisco ACI SDN and creates topology objects for those features.
As a first step of discovery, Cisco ACI Controller (APIC) is discovered through the ICMP discovery. On the discovery of APIC as a Host in Smart Assurance IP Domain Manager, it communicates with the DCF controller which provisons a discovery collector. The discovery collector runs REST APIs which are required to create a topology representation in the Smart Assurance IP domain manager.
Below diagram showcases how a typical Cisco ACI topology looks like after discovery.
