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Autodiscovery

Introduction

Observium was designed to auto-discover as much as possible. The auto-discovery process begins by using SNMP to gather information about a device. This information allows Observium to discover all the internal sensors and interfaces of this device. Next, Observium finds all the neighbors of this device by using protocols such as CDP, LLDP, FDP, or EDP, and gathering neighbor information from routing protocols such as OSPF.

When Observium sees a neighboring device that it doesn't yet know about, it'll try to contact that device using the pre-set SNMP communities in the configuration file. If Observium can successfully connect with the new device, the auto-discovery process will now run on this device. Observium will continue discovering until the entire network has been mapped.

Requirements

All of these items are required for auto-discovery to work correctly:

  1. SNMP must be enabled on your devices and be reachable by Observium
  2. SNMP settings on your devices must match what you have configured in config.php
  3. Access control lists (ACL) on the device must permit the IP of Observium
  4. Devices must return valid, resolvable sysNames. If the sysName reported by a device is not resolvable, the device won't be added. There are several ways to correct this:

Best method: Add DNS records that match the hostnames and domains that you have configured in your devices. Here is an example if you are using the BIND name server: 

device1      IN    A      192.168.186.1
device2      IN    A      192.168.186.2

Alternative: Add lines to the /etc/hosts file on Observium that match the hostnames and domains that you have configured in your devices. For example:

# IPaddress                     Hostname
192.168.186.1       device1.domain.com
192.168.186.2       device2.domain.com

Discovery Protocols

Observium will try to add any devices it sees via CDP, FDP, EDP or LLDP to its database if the identifier of the device doesn't match any sysName in the database.

OSPF

Observium will try to add any devices it sees as neighbours in OSPF to its database if the IP address of the neighbour isn't present in the database.

OSPF device auto-discovery is currently disabled as default, and needs to be manually enabled in the config file.