Administration Guide

Defining Excluded Nodes

When you do not need to audit specific computers or devices, you can exclude them from the inventory even when they still belong to the audited network segment. For example, when the Network Folder Audit or Remote Audit is triggered automatically using domain logon script or scheduled task, you may not want to audit domain controllers or database servers. Or, if you notice that the Direct Network Scan consistently fail on a particular Node, you may also want to permanently exclude that Node from the Site.

In these cases, you should add those Nodes to the Excluded Nodes list of your Site.

Consider the following aspects of excluding Nodes:

  • Excluded Nodes are not discovered nor audited during the Network Folder Audit, the Remote Audit (both FTP and email delivery), or the Direct Network Scan of the Site from which they are excluded.

    NOTE: Excluding Nodes from a Site does not affect Portable Audit Sources of that Site because the Portable Audit method is used to audit individual computers manually. For details, see Overview of Audit Methods.

  • When you add a Node to Excluded Nodes, Alloy Discovery asks you whether you want to also delete that Node from the Site. If the Node belongs to this Site only, deleting the Node from the Site will also delete its snapshot from the Alloy Discovery database. Otherwise, the snapshot will remain listed in other matching Sites.

  • All audit and discovery tasks for the Excluded Nodes in the Site or in the Audit Source within that Site appear with the ”Excluded" status in the Task Progress dialog box.

To exclude a Node from a Site:

  1. Right-click the Site in the Sidebar and select Properties from the context menu.

  2. In the Site [Site Name] dialog box, open the Excluded Nodes tab.

  3. To move a Node to Excluded Nodes:
    1. Click New from the module menu.
    2. In the Excluded Node dialog box, click the ellipsis button, select the Node to exclude and click OK.

      NOTE: Alternatively, you can enter a name of the Node manually. The standard wildcards are also available: an asterisk (*) to represent any number of characters, including zero, and the question mark (?) to represent any single character.

    3. Click OK.

      NOTE: You can also move a Network Node to Excluded Nodes direct from the Site grid by right-clicking the selected Node and choosing Move to Excluded Nodes from the pop-up menu.

  4. To redefine an excluded Node:
    • Select an excluded Node from the list, click Edit from the module menu, edit the name as needed and click OK.

      NOTE: You can use the standard wildcards: an asterisk (*) to represent any number of characters, including zero, and the question mark (?) to represent any single character.

  5. To remove a Node from Excluded Nodes: