The Discovery Engine is designed to locate systems in the network and obtain relevant information from them as quickly as possible, using a variety of different tools and techniques to communicate with devices.

The Reasoning Engine works on the raw data obtained by the Discovery Engine to infer the maximum amount of information about hosts and programs and populate the data store intelligently. The Reasoning Engine uses patterns that identify running software based on the network ports, processes found, packages installed, protocols used, and so on. It also intelligently searches the discovered data to work out relationships between items of software.

Much of the information required by the discovery system is set up by default. However, you need to configure a number of settings to make the system specific to your organization. Generally this only has to be done once.

Discovery and reasoning are collectively referred to as the discovery process. You should consider the following tasks when setting up the discovery process:

• Specify the extent of the discovery operation – that is, the hosts and subnets that Tideway Foundation will interrogate (identified by IP address).
• Set up the credentials that define how Foundation is to access the remote systems.
• Make any changes to the standard commands that can be run on the remote system in order to obtain information.
• Make any changes to the list of ports used in your environment, for example if you use a non-standard port number you would need to enter this here.
• Configure the level to which the discovery process scans and processes data.
• You can also monitor the current state of the discovery and reasoning process, run a one-off snapshot scan of a selected IP address range and schedule range scans.

Introduction to UNIX Discovery

The Tideway Foundation appliance is UNIX-based and uses the discovery service to determine the type and version of the operating system. The discovery service on the appliance attempts to connect to the host using telnet, ssh, or rlogin, performs connectivity checks on known ports, and uses SNMP to get information from the host before attempting to log in with stored credentials and run discovery commands. See The Discovery Service for more information.

Introduction to Windows Discovery

Windows discovery requires a Windows slave host since the methods that are used to access Windows hosts are only available from Windows systems. Windows discovery is described in Configuring Windows Discovery.

About Credentials

Tideway Foundation stores all passwords in a secure credential vault. Secure credential vaults are generated by Tideway Professional Services using public and private key pair when the appliance is commissioned. The contents of the vault is encrypted, and can be secured using a passphrase.
For information on configuring credentials, see Setting Up Credentials.