Device Profile Discovery is used to acquire device details and determine the characteristics of devices in use on networks. Asset Manager can be configured to send TCP, HTTP, SSL/HTTPS, and SNMP requests during Device Profiling to devices discovered during either Host Discovery or Path Discovery. As devices respond to these requests, Asset Manager examines the plain-text response and compares it to a collection of pre-defined patterns to determine if there is a match. If Asset Manager finds a match between the pre-defined patterns and the plain-text response, a device type is associated with that network entity.

Profile Discovery can be performed using HTTP and HTTPS protocols:

HTTP/HTTPS – Asset Manager opens the set of TCP ports you indicate and gathers the first 4096 bytes of the HTTP reply. For HTTPS, Asset Manager also stores the certificate information used in the TLS exchange. Asset Manager then gracefully closes the connection to any ports opened.

Asset Manager introduced the use of CIFS, a native file-sharing protocol in Windows, that enables Asset Manager to better identify Windows devices and distinguish one from another. To leverage this feature, select the Collect Windows File Sharing Protocol (CIFS) option when you configure Profile Discovery. 

• Profiling cannot be enabled/disabled like the other discovery methods because it automatically is enabled as soon as you enable either DNS or SNMP.
• Profiling via DNS is enabled when DNS is enabled because DNS also returnes profile data.
• Profiling via SNMP is enabled when SNMP is enabled because SNMP returns system information too.
• Profiling via CIFs and HTTPs cannot be enabled unless the user does so via Profile. In other words, one must enable Port discovery to see profiling via CIFS and HTTPs results. To profile via HTTP/HTTPS and any tcp profiling, you need to configure Profile options AND Port discovery for it to work. Those profiling options without Port discovery does not work.

 See Common Internet File System (CIFS) to learn more.

Configure Profile Interrogation

Configure Profile Interrogation as follows:

• Enable Profile Interrogation by selecting the Profile tab, clicking Edit, and updating the form.
  The Profile configuration is complete. Discovery cycles initiate with these settings.