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 datastore 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.

This section describes how Discovery operates and how to configure and run it. It contains the following sections:

• Understanding Discovery – describes the BMC Atrium Discovery Discovery process, that is, the sequence of operations used to perform discovery on a host.
• Running Discovery – describes how you run and monitor Discovery.
• Configuring Discovery – describes the configuration of Discovery including the commands used to obtain information from target systems.
• Improving Discovery – details features in the product to help you improve the level and quality of access to the environment.
• Credentials – contains information on Credentials, how they are stored, used, and configured.
• Consolidation – describes the centralization of discovery data from scheduled or snapshot scans on multiple Scanning appliances to one or more Consolidation appliances.
• Pattern Management – introduces patterns and describes uploading patterns to the appliance, activating or deactivating patterns on the appliance, and the deletion patterns which are no longer required.
• Technology Knowledge Update (TKU) – explains the method used by BMC Atrium Discovery to distribute Pattern Language (TPL) patterns that you can install.
• SQL Discovery – describes how to access valuable data held in databases that cannot be determined by the standard discovery process.