Discovered Records - Oracle Inventory

[Nico_Erasmus]

Hi Community.

I have a customer system (2018R2) where we have 200+ devices with multiple discovered records.  Note that the customer does not run discovery, so in theory all discovered records are created directly from the inventory that is imported either from 3rd party or FNMS agents.   There is only one active Inventory Device, so the multiple discovered records is confusing. 

The impact on Oracle inventory is especially concerning:

• Only one of the discovered devices shows as having being inventoried and having an agent installed - and frustratingly it shows no "Oracle" present.
• The one or 2 extra discovered devices with no agent and no inventory show oracle "yes".  They typically show that success on completely different dates.

I also see several unassigned subnets.  Could that be the cause of multiple discovered devices?

What impact does multiple discovered devices have on Oracle inventory? 

Further, it also appears that successful Oracle instance discovery and linking to the inventory device is ultimately what creates the "Oracle Database xx Enterprise" application record (as seen from the chain of events in an inventory device history).  Is this statement correct as the behavior is not documented (to my knowledge).

Thank you in advance for responses.

Nico

[mfranz]

Hi Nico,

I personally don't care about "Discovered Devices" too much, because most of my customers don't have real processes related to this data.

A few of your question seem related to compliance. So let me clarify this, Discovered Devices do not directly contribute to compliance, like in the sense of duplicates consuming additional licenses.

They can contribute indirectly as they are the base for some remote inventory processes. For example VMware vCenter inventory relies on a Discovered Device and so does Oracle Database Remote Inventory. In these cases, missing or wrong data might compromise the remote inventory process and therefore results. Which may affect compliance.

If you want to go beyond the remote inventory purpose, you should clarify on some things. Here would be an example, if you would like to use Discovered Devices to keep track of your FNMS Agent coverage through the network.

• what your goals are (maximizing coverage),
• where you want to get your data from (Agent, Discovery, external sources),
• how to possibly enrich the data with additional sources (AD, DNS, DHCP) and
• how to interpret the results (reports, processes).

For checking the Oracle inventory mapping I would advise looking at the "Oracle Instances" report. If hardware/software inventory and Oracle inventory were not matched correctly, you would likely find entries in there with "Audit evidence = no".

Best regards,

Markward

[Nico_Erasmus]

Thank you @mfranz  for your response.

I too am seldom interested in Discovery, but am currently pursuing a list of "known" oracle db servers.  "Known" because the customer uses their Prod and DR nodes interchangeably, and the SAM team do not know necessarily which device is active.

From these investigations, we are seeing in the audit history, that instances are created and deleted, which then lead to the creation  of the positive Oracle Database Enterprise .  Further, when we investigate discovery we see successful execution of the Oracle tasks, and instances are found by the Oracle tasks.  Unfortunately, if there is a disconnect between the discovered device and the inventoried device, then the instance is not recorded on the inventory device.

I am hoping to get or build some flow diagrams in respect of this activity in FNMS.