How agentless discovery of a Windows host works
To perform agentless discovery of a remote Windows host, InfoScale Operations Manager runs a script that executes data-gathering commands. The script uses Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), a Windows management technology that is used to work with remote hosts. The WMI calls use Microsoft's Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) to obtain the data from the host. InfoScale Operations Manager creates a private local user account (vomuser) on Management Server or a Control Host to facilitate its use of DCOM. To communicate between InfoScale Operations Manager Control Host and the remote host, WMI uses port 135.
InfoScale Operations Manager uses WMI in two ways:
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First, WMI contacts a service that runs on the remote host and invokes the service to perform the actions that collect data about the host. As it collects data, WMI sends the data back to the Control Host.
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Second, WMI invokes command line tools such as nslookup and fcinfo. The output from the command line tools saves to a data file on the remote host in the
%systemroot%\tempdirectory. InfoScale Operations Manager copies the file from the host's mapped admin$ filestore, sends it to InfoScale Operations Manager Control Host, and deletes the file from the remote host.
To perform this discovery process, InfoScale Operations Manager requires a local administrator account for the remote host.
Figure: Agentless discovery of Windows hosts depicts how InfoScale Operations Manager performs agentless discovery of Windows hosts.
Figure: Agentless discovery of Windows hosts
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