Owner's Manual

Configuring Dell OpenManage IT Assistant to Monitor Your Systems 115
Discovery in Tom’s Enterprise-Size Business
In a larger enterprise, Tom is the systems administrator for a network of
1,000 servers. Tom also supervises four technicians who assist him by taking
corrective action on servers when notified that a critical or warning event has
occurred. Tom’s four technicians have the following areas of responsibility:
• One administrator responsible for all remote systems
• One technician for the first shift (12 hours)
• One technician for the second shift (12 hours)
• One technician for weekends who works 24-hour shifts but who responds
only to critical and warning events when notified
Configuring the Discovery Settings
Since Tom is monitoring a network of servers and no clients, his primary
choice for a systems management protocol is SNMP. However, since he also
manages systems running Windows, he will also enable CIM (like Jane).
To configure the discovery settings for his servers, he will need to perform the
following tasks:
• Determine subnet ranges, IP addresses, and/or host names for the servers
that he wants to monitor.
• Determine the subnet ranges, host names, or IP addresses that he does not
want to monitor.
• Determine SNMP read-only (Get) and read-write (Set) community names
that he will use for his network.
• Install and configure the SNMP agents and the operating system SNMP
service on each system he wants to monitor.
• Determine appropriate discovery time-out values for the network.
IP Subnet Ranges for Servers
Tom’s first decision is to determine which of the 1,000 servers he wants to
monitor with IT Assistant. Tom may want to record the IP subnet range of
each subnet he wants to include in his discovery, any systems or ranges he
wants to exclude from discovery, corresponding community names used on
each subnet, and any other data he determines is relevant to his network.
An example of a form that captures this data appears in Table 6-2. Note that