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Disabled Discovery Tasks

The discovery process for network devices is divided into multiple Tasks. A Task is data collection related to a specific network protocol or technology (MPLS, Transceivers, ARP Table, Spanning-Tree Protocol, Multicast, or VXLAN). Each Task consists of 1 or more operational commands (CLI or API). You can find the list of all Discovery Tasks in the Feature Matrix.

Some fundamental Tasks are critical for discovery and topology calculations (Neighbors, ARP, Mac, RIB, etc.).

The Disabled Discovery Tasks settings were introduced in version 3.7.0. Since then, you can manipulate specific Tasks for the discovery process to avoid extra data collection (when particular protocols are not present on the network) or avoid specific operational commands from being executed on specific hardware platforms. Since version 6.8.0, you can filter disabled Tasks by the device’s Serial Number.

Warning

Disabling Tasks will reduce the level of information collected by IP Fabric. If some fundamental Tasks are disabled, it can affect the topology or path lookup results.

Default Disabled Discovery Tasks

Since version 6.3.0, Disabled Discovery Tasks contain the following three predefined rules:

Rule Name Rule Description
Disable Pagination By default disabled for F5 devices – the command is modifying the configuration and can break cluster synchronization.
Transceivers By default disabled for all vendors – certain Cisco platforms may be affected by a memory leak bug and lead to device crash or hung VTY line. More in Known Issues → Cisco.
NTP By default disabled for Cisco Firepower – on some versions, a Firepower bug may freeze the CLI session.

Prior to version 6.3.0, the Configuration saved rule (disabling for all vendors) was also present by default. New deployments of version 6.3.0 or newer do not have the rule predefined anymore. Upgrading from version 6.2.2 or older does not automatically remove the previously predefined rule.

Example of Adding a New Disabled Discovery Task

In the following example, we are creating a rule for disabling OSPFv3 on Arista vEOS. The test for the rule reveals 4 matches.

Example