Webinar recap: Network Discovery: Spotlight on Workgroups and beyond!

Think you know everything there is to know about Network Discovery? Well, not Atera’s Network Discovery! Here are the highlights of our recent webinar, introducing everything you need to know about Network Discovery Workgroups, and explaining what’s next on our exciting roadmap for this feature. Ready to learn how Network Discovery can supercharge your business? Keep reading!

Atera’s Network Discovery: Built to help you delight customers and boost business

Let’s start with four of the most common use cases for Network Discovery, helping you to prove the value of the work that you do for your business.

1. 1. Security: As you grow, you want to be aware of every change in the network, as every new device that pops up could be a security breach. Network Discovery gives you the chance to make sure all machines are patched, being monitored by a robust antivirus program, and of course — covered by the Atera agent.
2. 2. Onboarding: Make it quicker to onboard new clients as an MSP, or new sites in corporate IT, by running a Network Discovery scan. You’ll get a full assessment and a snapshot of the network that can be used as a baseline for reporting or changes.
3. 3. Opportunities: Allow your business to scale by offering the right services at the right time for new endpoints on the network, and finding upsell opportunities for your devices, such as aging hardware disks, or unmonitored assets.
4. 4. Visibility and ongoing monitoring: Monitoring of all devices on a regular basis, including enhanced insight with Atera’s Network Discovery for Workgroups, which improves your visibility over the network. Altogether it’s now possible to detect up to 10x more devices!

How to Use Atera’s Network Discovery

Aryeh and Shahar walked us through how to access and utilize Network Discovery through the Atera platform, including how to navigate to Network Discovery from the dashboard, and how to activate the feature using the Network Discovery wizard.

Once you’ve activated the feature, you can get started by simply selecting a customer and clicking to start running a scan. Here’s where Network Discovery for Workgroups comes in handy when it’s time to select your scanning agent. Atera always recommends you use a domain controller which will provide you with admin rights to see the most available information, but you can now scan from any device with an agent, however, bear in mind that this may impact your ability to see items like hard disk information.

Top tip: If you have multiple subnetworks, you can have multiple scans running simultaneously, which will allow you to get your results faster!

We loved seeing the results, with a breakdown of all the general details for where and how the scan was run, including the public IP and default gateway, and then the device types, and all the OS editions and versions. Scroll down, and you’ll see a snapshot of your network, covering types of devices, what is currently online, OS versions, device names and types, IP and MAC addresses, and much more. From the same report, you can view SNMP devices, too.

During the webinar, we also got a neat walkthrough of Opportunities, highlighting three important categories, newly added workstations, unmonitored SNMP devices, and aging storage disks. This is a quick way to see some easy upsell opportunities, so you can turn to your customer and let them know what devices don’t have an Atera agent installed on them, as well as the SNMP devices that are sitting unmonitored and may be opening them up to unnecessary risk. For aging storage disks, you know exactly where these are, so you can suggest that they are upgraded to SSDs, as is the current industry standard. You can see a total sum of all the unmonitored devices from the dashboard, including desktops, laptops, and SNMP devices.

Don’t forget – when you set up a Network Discovery scan, it will continually update itself at set intervals, adding newly discovered devices, without you needing to run the scan again.

What’s Next for Network Discovery?

This is just the tip of the iceberg for Network Discovery. We are delighted to let you know that we now have a dedicated team who works on Network Discovery alone, and they have an exciting roadmap for valuable and advanced features, many of which come directly from you, the Atera community!

Coming up very soon is vulnerability scanning to tighten the security around the network, and a brand new Network Discovery UI for a more seamless experience where you can manage all of your networks from one single view.

Longer-term, we’re going to be offering you more advanced network information for maintaining your network health and uptime, and providing advanced settings to fully control the scan. Look out for the ability to scan multiple subnets from a single agent, and scan devices that aren’t suitable for having an agent installed, such as cameras, IoT devices, or alarms.

Our Network Discovery webinar was awesome! To recap the full event and watch the product demo, plus to get access to the Q&A, watch the full webinar here.

https://vimeo.com/647257378