Unmanaged device discovery overview

Unmanaged device discovery (UDD) provides many ways to scan for and detect unmanaged devices on your network.

Endpoint Manager 2021.1 adds a new agent deployment wizard so you can easily deploy agents to discovered devices. For more information see Agent deployment wizard (2021.1).

Here are the basic UDD scanning methods:

  • Network scan: Looks for computers by doing an ICMP ping sweep. This is the most thorough search, but also the slowest. You can limit the search to certain IP and subnet ranges. By default this option uses NetBIOS to try and gather information about the device.
    • IP OS fingerprinting: Use nmap to try and discover more about a device, such as what operating system it is running.
    • SNMP: UDD uses SNMP to discover devices. Click Configure to enter information about SNMP on your network.
  • Standard Ivanti agent: Looks for the standard Ivanti agent (CBA) on computers. This option discovers computers that have the Ivanti products installed.
  • NT domain: Looks for devices in a domain you specify. Discovers members whether the computer is on or off.
  • LDAP: Looks for devices in a directory you specify. Discovers members whether the computer is on or off.
  • IPMI: Looks for servers enabled with the Intelligent Platform Management Interface, which allows you to access many features regardless of whether the server is turned on or not, or what state the OS may be in.
  • Virtual hosts: Looks for servers running VMware ESX Server. These servers appear in the Virtual hosts folder.

To automate unmanaged device discovery, you can schedule UDD scans to occur periodically. For example, you could divide your network into thirds and schedule a ping sweep for one third each night.

If you schedule a discovery, the core server does the discovering. Unscheduled discoveries happen from the console that starts them.

Extended device discovery

The UDD tool also supports extended device discovery (XDD) scanning. XDD relies on a device agent (deployed via an agent configuration) that listens for ARP broadcasts and WAP signals on your Ivanti network. The XDD agent on a configured device then checks to see if the broadcasting device has the standard Ivanti agent installed. If the standard Ivanti agent doesn't respond, an ARP discovered device displays in the Computers group with reported information in the item list view, and a WAP device displays in the Wireless Access Points group with reported information in the list view.

Extended device discovery is ideal in situations involving firewalls that prevent devices from responding to the normal ping-based UDD discovery methods.

For information on enabling XDD on clients, see Self-electing subnet services and Configuring devices to use extended device discovery (ARP and WAP)

NOTE: Use extended device discovery to discover firewalled devices
Be aware that the normal unmanaged device discovery methods usually can't discover devices that use a firewall, such as the Windows firewall that is built into Windows. The firewall typically prevents the device from responding to the discovery methods that unmanaged device discovery uses. Extended device discovery helps solve this problem by using network ARP traffic to discover devices.

Related topics

Deploy Ivanti agents to unmanaged devices

Discover unmanaged devices with UDD

Work with devices found through XDD

What happens when a device is discovered

Use extended device discovery (with ARP and WAP)

Unmanaged device discovery help