If you have ever configured a CI type for discovery and started the discovery operation, it might have happened that DataMiner Infrastructure Discovery and Provisioning app (IDP) finds products, but it is not able to match the products to a CI Type. If this occurs, it’s very likely you forgot to enable discovery for this CI Type. To be honest, it’s an easy thing to forget: after configuring the CI type in the tab Admin > CI Types, you need to navigate to the tab Processes > Automation to enable the discovery for the CI type.
Configuring the CI Type for an activity is not the same as enabling it. And there’s a good reason for that: if you’re in the middle of configuring the CI type, you need to have control over the CI Type and its activities when it is being used. Additionally, a CI Type that is being used could have some of its activities disabled (even temporarily) while its configuration must remain intact for future usage.
However, there are also situations where you need the activities of a CI Type to be automatically enabled. So in this version, we are introducing an Activity Management overview. For each activity, you can choose whether the activity should be automatically enabled when the CI Type becomes fully configured for the activity. And this feature can easily be enabled or disabled from the tab Admin > CI Types; no other tab visits required!
Another powerful item we added, is the ability to use a product’s discovery responses immediately during provisioning. The provisioning part of a CI Type can now also contain placeholders that refer to discovery actions of any discovery profile. When an element is provisioned, these placeholders will be replaced by the responses of the product. Think of the following examples:
- Construct the element name using the sysName (SNMP) or CSName (WMI) in the element name.
- Automatically fill in the custom element property Contact with the sysContact (SNMP).
- Assign elements to a view per software version.
Finally, this release also comes with the following items:
- You can now assign elements to the front or the rear side of the rack.
- The rack overview now has better support for long element names.
- The tab Processes > Automation has been renamed Processes > Activities.
- The IDP correlation rules have been optimized and moved to a dedicated folder in the Correlation module.
A complete overview of all features and enhancements is available in the DataMiner IDP 1.1.16 Release Notes.