Discovery design considerations

Discovery is an expensive process in terms of required processing and network resources, so making the appropriate choices during design is imperative. The discovery implementation is very flexible and allows many variations.

To simplify discovery design, consider the following aspects of discovery:

• Initial topology discovery

• Subsequent topology discovery and maintenance

• Network security such as firewall ports, access lists, and SNMP versions

• Certified device types and the device types in your deployment

• Name resolution method for the naming of discovered devices

• Discovery postprocessing and the customizing of postprocessing