In CCA, what is the difference between Blueprint Discovery and Network Discovery Gateway (NDG)
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In CCA, what is the difference between Blueprint Discovery and Network Discovery Gateway (NDG)

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Article ID: 127834

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Updated On:

Products

CENDURA CA Configuration Automation

Issue/Introduction

The two main components of CCA is a Blueprint Discovery that uses Agent or Agentless methods to discover components and Network Discovery Gateway (NDG) that utilizes Softagent (agentless only) to gather certain data.  What are the differences between these discoveries?

Environment

Configuration Automation (CCA) 12.8 or later

Resolution

Blueprint Discovery
Discovery Access Methods: Uses CCA Agent, that can be installed via CCA Web UI or manually.  The CCA Agent is a lightweight agent that only runs when a blueprint discovery is initiated.  Alterntatively, you can use agentless technology to do the same exact blueprint discovery, which is either WMI for Windows or SSH for Linux\Unix machines. 

Discovery Data: Each blueprint contains different data that it will discovery based on what blueprint(s) are selected for your discovery.  To see what data will be discovered, simply click on the blueprint itself and you can view all the data that will attempt to be collected.  Any blueprint can be modified (after copying the out of box version) or create a new one, which allows the ability to customize the collection and parsing of almost any set of data. 

View Discovered Data: Any discovered blueprints are called Components and can be viewed within each server within the "Components" and "All Components" tab.  The difference between those tabs is the "All Components" is every single component ever discovered on that server from any Management Profile assigned to it at the time of discovery whereas "Components" is the blueprints discovered from the currently assigned Management Profile



Network Discovery Gateway (NDG) Scan
Discovery Access Methods: NDG uses ONLY Softagents, which is strickly an agentless technology.   This includes WMI for Windows or SSH for Linux\Unix machines as well as some other options such as SNMP and VMware WSDL connections if target machines require those connections

Discovery Data: The data collected by NDG is a static set of data.  That means that it discoveries a finite set of data without the ability to modify any of the commands nor add or delete. 

View Discovered Data: All discovered data will be shown within each server under the "Server" tab, starting with Server Details, and along on the right with "Network Adapters", "Hardware", "Applications", "Services/Daemons" and "Open Ports".  Within each of those sub tabs, numerous items can be discovered, but there are some differences of Operating System coverage per our documentation: 

Softagent Platform Coverage for CA NDG Discovery

View Differences