Discovery Types

Open-AudIT supports three types of discovery, each designed for a different scenario. When you click Advanced on the Create Discoveries form, you can choose which type to use.

Subnet Discovery (Default)

This is the standard mode. You provide an IP address, range, or subnet and Open-AudIT scans every IP in that range.

Use this when you know exactly which IP ranges you want to audit and have a well-defined network.

Example inputs:

• 192.168.1.0/24 — scans all 254 usable addresses in that subnet
• 10.0.1-5.1-254 — scans IPs 10.0.1.1 through 10.0.5.254
• 192.168.1.50 — scans a single device

Active Directory Discovery

Instead of scanning IP ranges, Open-AudIT queries your Active Directory domain for a list of computer accounts and then audits those machines directly.

This is useful when you manage primarily Windows environments and want to make sure every AD-registered machine gets audited — even machines that are on dynamic IP addresses.

To use this, select Active Directory as the discovery type and provide the AD domain and credentials with permission to query AD.

Seed Discovery

Seed discovery is clever. You give Open-AudIT one or more starting IP addresses (the "seeds"), and it discovers what other devices those devices know about — usually via SNMP neighbor tables, ARP tables, or routing tables. It then scans those additional IPs, and again asks each one what it knows about, continuing until it runs out of new IPs to scan.

This is the right tool when you don't know your network's full IP range — for example, if you're auditing a large or unfamiliar network for the first time. It's intelligent enough not to re-scan an IP it's already visited.

Seed discovery was introduced in Open-AudIT v4.1.

Which Type Should I Use?