Best Practice: Discoveries should not be too frequent

 

What does this best practice check for?

Discoveries in management packs run periodically to “discover” instances of MP classes. As a best practice, discovery intervals should not run more frequently than 4 hours. MPBPA will produce a critical violation for discoveries that run more frequently than 1 hour, and a warning violation for discoveries that run at intervals between 1 and 4 hours.

Why is it important to follow this best practice? What is the impact of not following this best practice?

Discoveries are an expensive operation to run in terms of performance, and running them very frequently can create possible performance issues. Moreover, because customers use management packs to monitor production environments, it is very unlikely that things change very frequently in a customer environment; in fact, 24 hours is an acceptable discovery interval for most management packs.

How do I fix this in my MP?

Using the Authoring Console:

1.        For any discovery, open up the Properties dialog. Under the Configuration tab, ensure that IntervalSecondsis set to atleast14400 seconds (4 hours).

In XML:

     < Discovery ID = " Microsoft.Windows.Server.2008.Computer.Discovery" Enabled =" onEssentialMonitoring" Target =" Windows!Microsoft.Windows.Server.Computer" >

       < Category > Discovery </ Category >

       …

       < DataSource ID = " DS" TypeID =" Microsoft.Windows.Server.2008.Discovery.DataSource" >

          < IntervalSeconds > 86400 </ IntervalSeconds >

         < TimeoutSeconds > 360 </ TimeoutSeconds >

         < SourceId > $MPElement$ </ SourceId >

       </ DataSource >

     </ Discovery >