Doubt with Collection Profile

[victor.vasoler]

I hope you could help me to clarify the following doubt, please.

Once a week we collect around 6000+ devices in the collector, which represent around 14,000 chassis in total (taking into consideration routers, stacks of switches, WAAS, WLC, APs, etc).

I have noticed that the Collection Profile is configured with the following 2 options by default:
*Run Discovery before collection
*Run DAV before collection

Each of these tasks add more delay to complete the overall collection process in the 6000+ devices.

I would like to know what would be the best practice regarding those options. Should I leave both of them enabled?

Doesn't the "Run Discovery before collection" have an implicit "DAV" (device access verification) in the process?

Would you recommend to leave both of them enabled or just one? I think the "discovery" process could be helpful for us, because our environment is very changing and every week there are changes in the infrastructure, but I'm not so sure if the "DAV" provides an additional benefit when they both are enabled.

Please let me know your suggestions.

Thank you!

Victor Vazquez

[CC Cisco]

Hello Victor,

The current CSPC version requires that both options be enabled by default.

Even though they do add additional time to the inventory, each one is used differently for internal applications which are required for the CSPC functionality.

In your case it might not be as apparent, but each of these tasks' purpose is more apparent when protocols other than SNMP are enabled.

Regards,

Cesar

[Chris Camplejohn · Accepted solution]

Also note that the discovery before collection here is not the "auto-discovery" of new devices.  It is a lightweight rediscovery of the devices already managed before collecting from them.  This is because the basic discovery data is what tells CSPC how to collect from a device.  For example, let's say you have an IP managed and it is an IOS router.  And you replace that device with an Nexus7K (same IP).  We would not want to keep collecting from that device thinking it was an IOS router.  So the discover before collection is just a bootstrap.

The Device Access Verification is very helpful for troubleshooting when collected data is missing for devices.  You can see which credentials are failing and might need to be updated (or populated) in CSPC.