Deploying Your Sensor in a DHCP Environment

USM Anywhere provides powerful tools to help you continually monitor your network and assets. While you can further enhance these capabilities by adding additional tools or applications within your environment, these additional resources require further deployment and configuration considerations.

If you are deploying a USM Anywhere Sensor in an environment with Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), you may run the risk of irresolvable duplicate assets within USM Anywhere. Follow these best practice guidelines to avoid creating duplicate assets and to enable your sensor to resolve any duplicate assets that it discovers.

The sensor's asset discovery app resolves duplicate assets with the following steps:

  1. Check for existing assets with the same media access control (MAC) address reported.
  2. Check for existing assets with the same IP address and hostname combination reported.
  3. Check for existing assets with the same hostname reported.
  4. Check for existing assets with the same IP address reported.

Be sure to deploy your USM Anywhere Sensor in the network in which it will be performing its scans so that it can resolve the MAC addresses.

Assign a unique hostname to each asset in your network, particularly if your sensor and your assets cannot be on the same network. This enables the sensor to perform asset resolution using the hostname.

If your sensor is collecting asset information using one of the sensor apps, you should not be running additional asset discovery tasks in that same network range.

Note: If you do want to run Nmap to discover services, software, and so on, be sure to run the scan only against specific assets instead of running asset discovery.

If you have multiple sensors in the same account, be sure to configure their asset discovery jobs carefully. Ensure that their asset discovery jobs aren't for the same IP range, and that the networks the sensors are scanning do not overlap.

If you have multiple sensors in the same account and they are all discovering asset information using their sensor apps, ensure that only one of them has an asset discovery job configured in the scheduler.