Directed Discovery

Directed discovery is the process of manually adding nodes to Horizon through the requisition UI. Two other methods for manually adding nodes (quick add node and manually adding an interface) are in the process of being deprecated. We do not recommend using these features.

Make sure you complete the tasks in the Getting Started section before adding nodes.

Add nodes through the Requisition UI

Before adding nodes to a requisition, you must create a requisition.

  1. In the web UI, click the gear icon in the top right.

  2. In the Provisioning area, choose Manage Provisioning Requisition.

  3. Click the edit icon beside the requisition you want to add nodes to.

  4. Click Add Node.

    1. Horizon auto-generates the foreign ID used to identify this node.

  5. Fill out information in each of the tabs and click Save.

    • basic information (node label, auto-generated foreign ID, location)

    • path outage (configure network path to limit notifications from nodes behind other nodes, see Path Outages)

    • interfaces (add interface IP addresses and services)

    • assets (pre-defined metadata types)

    • categories (label/tag for type of node, e.g., routers, production, switches)

    • meta-data (customized asset information)

  6. Repeat for each node you want to add.

  7. Click Return to view the list of nodes you have added.

  8. Click Synchronize to provision them to the Horizon database.

Add nodes via REST API

You can use the REST API to add nodes to your Horizon database. There are endpoints for both individual nodes and entire requisitions.

Add nodes via newSuspect events

You can use the ${OPENNMS_HOME}/bin/send-event.pl script to generate newSuspect events to trigger the Provisiond service to check a given IP address. Replace ip-address in the command below with the address you want to discover.

# ${OPENNMS_HOME}/bin/send-event.pl --interface ip-address uei.opennms.org/internal/discovery/newSuspect
This adds the discovered node directly into the database. We strongly recommend that you use requisitions when adding individual IP addresses, as it will be easier to manage the nodes over time.