SCOM 2012 Network Discovery with primary IP

In a customers environment I recently had the behavior that multiple network devices have not or have been discovered with other than the primary IP address.

After some deep dives into SCOM and it’s brand new network monitoring I found out that there is a config file that can be modified.

Within the file you find two paragraphs were one has a variable called “AccessAddressFormat” with a default value “AUTOADDRESS”. After changing the value to “LOOPBACKADDRESS” as shown in the screenshot below, restarting the Health Service and running the discovery rule again, the devices have been discovered as expected.

Hint: don’t forget to delete the devices with the unwanted IPs and remove them from the exclusion list of your discovery rule!

Further there is another variable called “DisplayNameFormat” with a default value “AUTOASSIGNED” as shown in the screenshot below. If your network devices have a proper MIB-II sysName configured and you do not have DNS entries for those devices, you can change the value to show the sysName value as Display Name.

Here is the default path for the config file:

C:\Program Files\System Center 2012\Operations Manager\Server\NetworkMonitoring\conf\discovery\discovery.conf

Don’t forget to copy it to all of your Management Servers in your Network Devices Resource Pool.

All information is provided "as is" without any warranty! Try in lab before. Handle with care in production.