SCCM 2012 R2 Discovery Methods

SCCM 2012 R2 Discovery Methods

To gather information regarding your resources in your company , configuration manager 2012 R2 makes use of methods called discovery methods. 

Configuration Manager 2012 R2 uses a variety of discovery methods to gather resource information and each of the discovery methods gathers information about different objects.

There are 6 types of of Discovery methods. they are:

• Active Directory Forest Discovery
• Active Directory Group Discovery
• Active Directory System Discovery
• Active Directory User Discovery
• HeartBeat Discovery
• Network Discovery

Active Directory Forest Discovery:

This discovers Active Directory sites and subnets, and then creates Configuration Manager boundaries for each site and subnet from the forests which have been configured for discovery. With this discovery method you are able to automatically create the Active Directory or IP subnet boundaries that are within the discovered Active Directory Forests.

Active Directory Group Discovery:

This discovers local, global, and universal security groups, the membership within these groups. When you configure the Group discovery you have the option to discover the membership of distribution groups. With the Active Directory Group Discovery you can also discover the computers that have logged in to the domain in a given period of time.

Active Directory System Discovery:

This discovers the computers in your organization from specified locations in Active Directory Domain Services then we use Active Directory System Discovery. In order to push the SCCM clients into the computers, the resources must be discovered first. There is an option to discover the computers that have logged on to a domain in given period of time

Active Directory User Discovery:

This discovers the user accounts from your Active Directory domain. You will have to specify the Active Directory container to search for the user accounts.

HeartBeat Discovery:

This discovery runs on every Configuration Manager client and is used by Active Configuration Manager clients to update their discovery records in the database.

Network Discovery:

This discovery searches your network infrastructure for network devices that have an IP address. It can search the domains, SNMP devices and DHCP servers to find the resources.