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Overview of Discovery Function

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"Discovery" is a special type of project that contains scan jobs for the selected File shares/exports profiling each for the size of files and number of files found --this data is primarily useful for estimating how long a data movement job might take, but there may be other uses as well.

Once one or more storage connections have been configured on a Storage System, a Discovery project can be created by clicking the "Discover Now" button, it will create the a project with default settings, and jobs for all the selected storage. By default, special directories are not selected, these are directories that end with "$", or that contain other directories (if a connection has shares "/dir1" and "/dir1/dir2", we can see that "/dir2" is a subdirectory of "/dir1", and so "/dir1" would not be selected by default).

The default product of the scan will be a "gzip" file for each share and each selected format containing:

  • Printable HTML report.
  • CSV file of the report data.

Note:
Reports can also be generated in XML and json (there must be at least one format selected).

Clicking the "Scan Settings" button will open up a panel with the Project level settings including:

  • SMB version.
  • Security protocol.
  • Worker limit (the number of simultaneous scans that will run).
  • Report format selection at the top of the panel.

Below that is the section for "Discover File System Targets", which will show:

  • Total number of shares associated with the Storage System.
  • Number shares selected to be scanned.
  • Number shares shown are visible and hidden and can be selected.
  • When "Select All" option is chosen all visible and hidden shares are selected.

Inside this panel is a section for each Storage Connection, which will show the total number of shares and the number selected on each Storage Connection. There is a tag-filter input for each Storage Connection that will allow the user to enter multiple search tags, filtering out any share that does not match one or more of the filter tags. The filter input is a way to slim down the display of shares when they may number in the hundreds, when the user is only concerned about scanning a select few of them. It is important to recognize that the "Select All" checkbox will always select or deselect all shares, even ones filtered out, not only the visible ones; see the "(x of y selected, z shown)" text on each Storage Connection panel.

Current selection is temporarily stored in the browser. When the "Discover Now" is clicked, it will trigger the creation of the Discovery project and jobs.

IMPORTANT:
Discovery Projects and Discovery (DSC) Jobs will all be removed after being idle for 5 days
.

When the scan is complete, all the created reports will be downloadable by clicking the "Download Report" button.

  1. Notes:
    This  will potentially clear any previous project and jobs for that system (if they exist), Also, unsaved changes of selection/settings will be lost when refreshing the page or navigating away from the browser page. This means that the user can switch back and forth adjusting settings/selections on different Storage Systems before starting the scan, and the changes will be preserved so long as they do not navigate away from the page.
  2. If any of the shares were unreachable (for any number of reasons), and the scan for that share fails, that share will not have a report in the collected reports, but progress will still progress toward 100%. The progress counts any job processed towards progress, so if all the jobs failed, it would still show 100% done, even though the reports zip file would be empty.
  3. When scan jobs fail, scroll down to the "Discovery Jobs" monitor panel, and find the job with the 'FAILED' status, examine the Job report, which should give some indication of why the job failed (often there will be a notice in the progress column for the job as well).
  4. The "Clear Settings" button which will remove the project and the jobs (since the settings are stored in the project and jobs).
  5. Refreshing the page or navigating away and back will return the Storage System to the default settings/selections.

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