Device discovery

What are devices?

“Device” is another term for node, commonly used in the core NSP documentation set and NSP UI. Devices are also referred to as Network Elements (NEs) in the context of the managed NSP network. There is no functional difference between the terms and they are interchangeable.

What is device management and how does it work?

Device discovery is the process where NSP is provided with the management IP address of a supported node, establishes communication with the node, and adds the node to the network. Once the node has been discovered, it becomes “managed”.

NSP supports two main types of discovery and management:

Model-driven management (MDM) is how NSP manages Nokia and multivendor nodes. Support is provided by adaptors installed in the NSP that provide mediation between certain NSP functions and Nokia/third-party node database models that defines the object and parameter structure of the node.
Classic management is provided by the optionally deployable NSP component, NFM-P. Classic nodes are discovered in the NSP and managed by the NFM-P in the background. To ensure alignment between NSP and NFM-P, Nokia recommends that all management operations be performed in the NSP.

Note: If a node is managed through both an MDM NSP discovery rule and a classic discovery rule, a duplicate entry for the node will appear in the managed network.

Discovery rules

Discovery rules define the protocols and IP address ranges used that NSP uses in node discovery. A “unified” discovery rule supports the discovery of both MDM and classic nodes, allowing you to perform both types of discovery with a single configuration form. Discovery of classic nodes is provided by a linking between the unified rule and a previously-defined classic discovery rule. The classic discovery rule contains the mediation and reachability policy information required to discover and manage the classic nodes in the specified IP address ranges.

See Device discovery procedures for procedures on creating the policies required to discover nodes.

Discovering devices in Enterprise NSP

The onboarding wizard (see Chapter 3, Enterprise NSP onboarding) provides an opportunity to set up node discovery and manage nodes when first setting up NSP. You can manage node discovery manually with the following workflow:

Create a list of nodes to be managed and record their management IP addresses for use in a discovery rule.
Create a unified discovery rule and set the Admin State of the discovery rule to “Up”. See Creating a unified discovery rule
Verify the management state of nodes. See Viewing managed devices.

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