Search Stage of Discovery

Search is the first stage of Discovery Process. Its objective is to find available network hosts and detect the services/applications they're currently running. This is achieved by scanning IP addresses for specified services, i.e. trying to communicate with each of the services assigned for discovery at a particular IP address. How the scan is actually accomplished is determined by discovery search parameters.

Search parameters specify what to search for, where to search, and how to search:

  • What to scan for? This question is answered at Service Selection step with a list of services to be discovered are specified along with scan options for each.
  • Where to scan? Host Addresses Specification step allows to build the list of IP addresses to be scanned.
  • How to scan? Discovery Tuning step tells how to go about the scanning process concurrency, time limits, and accuracy.

The way how parameters are set depends on the discovery mode:

Thus, we can say the Search stage is divided into two parts: parameters specification and scanning process itself i.e. search itself with respect to the parameters provided.

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