How to Audit Network Nodes

Alloy Discovery allows you to model the entities of your company such as local offices, branches etc. by creating Sites. Then you define the methods for auditing computers, Chromebooks and network devices by creating Audit Sources within Sites and perform discovery and audit.

Alloy Discovery offers the following methods for auditing network nodes:

• Computers within your local network can be audited by using one of the following methods:

• The Direct Network Scan Audit method. This allows auditing networked computers regularly or at your request. You can audit either the entire network domain, or a chosen organizational unit within a domain, or an IP address range, or just a single computer chosen by its name or IP address. For details, refer to Direct Network Scan.

• The Network Folder Audit method. This method allows auditing networked computers on a regular basis using the Inventory Analyzer package deployed to a network share. For details, refer to Network Folder Audit.

• Computers that are not within the local network can be audited by using one of the following two methods:

• For computers within an external network that are connected to the Internet and can send e-mail, use the Remote Audit with e-mail delivery method. For details, refer toRemote Audit with email delivery.

• For Windows computers within an external network that are connected to the Internet and can transfer data via FTP, use the Remote Audit with FTP delivery method. For details, refer to Remote Audit with FTP delivery.

• For Windows computers within an external network that are connected to the Internet and can transfer data via FTP, use the FTP Audit method. For details, refer to Remote Audit with FTP delivery.

• For non-networked computers or computers on locked down network segments, use the Portable Audit method. For details, refer to Portable Audit.

• Chromebooks can be audited using the Google Directory Audit method.

• Network devices can be audited using the Direct Network Scan method.

All of the audit methods let you audit both physical computers and virtual machines. It also allows you to audit the computers running hypervisors. You can see whether the machine is a virtual one, a hypervisor or not by viewing its Computer's records details, for details, see Viewing Computer Details.

NOTE: Virtual machines and hypervisors appear in a predefined Virtual Machines Collection and a Hypervisors Collection respectively (for details, see Working with Collections).

NOTE: To audit the VMware ESXi hyprevisor, only On-Demand Audit can be used.