Before you begin the design of the discovery process in your deployment, read the comprehensive description of the discovery process in the IP Manager Concepts Guide.

As explained in the IP Manager Concepts Guide, the IP Manager uses ICMP and SNMP polling to collect data from the managed network topology, and uses the collected data to create instances of the managed devices and their internal components. During postprocessing, the IP Availability Manager imports the topology from the individual IP Managers, merges the topologies, creates the connections between the managed devices, and establishes device relationships.