Discovery has just acquired a snazzy new feature that will be available starting with the "Stable 3" build coming up in early September, and it will be in the Fall 2010 release. The screenshot at right (click to enlarge) shows the basic idea: a visualization of a discovery, in this case of a single device (my laptop!). Time proceeds from left to right. At the far upper-left corner, you can see the Shazzam probe, followed by the Shazzam sensor, followed by the UNIX - Classify probe, and so on. The probes have a black background, the sensors a red background.
All the interesting stuff happens after the Mac OS X - Identity sensor runs, as it launches all the exploration probes. Later, you can see that the Mac OS X - Active Processes sensor also launches some more exploration probes, as it found MySQL and Apache running. The whole process, complete with timing, is laid out in front of you.
But wait! There's more!
For starters, you can also get a discovery timeline for an entire discovery (all devices), not just a single device as I showed above. The timeline at left shows a small discovery (the stuff on my home network); more timeline would show if you could scroll down. There is a limit to how many ECC queue entries can be displayed, mainly so that it doesn't take an unexpectedly long time. Exactly how many is controlled by a property; out of the box this is set to 300.
Each of the bars represents a single probe or sensor. The entire length of the bar shows how long the entire probe or sensor process took. The inner silver or green bars show how long the probe or sensor was queued up, while the remainder shows how long the probe took to gather its information or the sensor took to analyze that data. In addition (as you can see at right), if you hover your mouse over any bar you'll get a pop-up display with more detailed information.
Finally, if you double-click on any bar, you'll get a pop-up form showing the ECC queue entry for that probe or sensor. Add all these features together and you've got a very easy-to-use tool for visualizing, analyzing its performance, and troubleshooting any issues — all from a single screen. As we were developing this new discovery timeline, we quickly found ourselves relying on it to find out what actually happened in a discovery. I'm sure you will as well...
So how do you get this beautiful timeline? It's easy! If you drill into any discovery status record, you'll see a new link: Show Discovery Timeline (see at right). And if you drill into any device, you'll see another new link: Show Device Timeline (see at left). That's all there is to it!
