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Connectivity Test

In the Forward Platform, devices may be added via the API or imported via the GUI. For each added device, the device-type and credentials must be specified before the collector can initiate a snapshot collection. If omitted or incorrectly specified, a variety of collector errors may occur during snapshot collection (refer to Collection debugging for more details).

Forward Platform users can take advantage of the Connectivity Test feature to reduce the effort required to map a device-type and credential onto each individual device. During a Connectivity Test, the Forward Collector will attempt to auto-detect the device-type and auto-associate device credentials for every device subjected to the test. This documentation page provides additional details of the Connectivity Test process. Step-by-step instructions for adding device(s) to the network are available on Collector Configuration page.

Device-type Auto-Detection​

During the device-type auto-detection, the Forward Collector logs into a given device and attempts to detect the device-type by sequentially issuing a series of commands. Some commands will be skipped if the retrieved information is sufficient to detect the device-type. For more information on the commands used for device-type auto-detection, plese refer to the Type discovery section in the CLI Commands page.

The execution of these commands should not significantly impact the control plane and the data plane on the devices subjected to connectivity test.

Credentials Auto-Association​

If more than one set of credentials is specified on a Network, and a network device is configured to Auto-Associate login credentials, then each credential will be tested in sequence until a successful login is achieved.

To avoid tripping excessive-login alarms, the Forward Collector will slow sequential logins to a specific device during the credential auto-associate phase. The consequence of this is that it could take 5-10 minutes for the proper credentials to be discovered.

Starting and Stopping the Connectivity Test​

  1. Navigate to Sources --> Devices and select a given device or bulk-select all devices in the current list view. Please note that you can display a subset of the current list view by using the filters available for each attribute of the device (table columns).
  2. Click on Test connectivity and the connectivity test will start.
  3. To stop the connectivity test, click on Cancel tests

Collector Configuration

From here you can proceed to the Advanced Configuration section to explore more sophisticated configuration options or jump to the Snapshots section to take your first network collection.