Introduction


Freshservice comes with a ready-to-use Discovery Probe that can scan your network or connect to your SCCM instance to identify the hardware assets in your organization and add them to your helpdesk. 


The Freshservice Probe is a Windows application that can be installed on any workstation or laptop in your network. Once installed, the Probe can scan through all kinds of computers (including those running on Mac OS X or Linux), network routers, switches, and other devices such as printers. As long as you have the probe running on the same network, you will be able to go through asset discovery without any problems. Besides scanning for devices, you can use Probe to import users from your Active Directory and also schedule periodic scans. The Probe can also connect to SCCM and sync all the device information to Freshservice. 


How the Probe Fetches Information

Standard Probe (Network and Domain Scans)

  • For scanning Windows machines, the Probe uses WMI
  • For scanning information from Linux and Mac machines, the Probe executes shell commands through SSH
  • For scanning network devices such as Printers, Routers, Firewall, and Switches, the Probe uses SNMP protocol.


SCCM Probe

  • Read-only access to the SCCM database. The details of the Views and columns used to sync data from SCCM and Freshservice can be found in this solution article.


Credentials required for Using the Probe

  • Admin access to the machine where the Probe is installed
  • Domain user credentials for AD user import
  • If machines in a domain are to be scanned, then the admin credentials of that domain have to be specified and stored in the probe
  • SNMP read credentials required to discover the SNMP devices printer, router, switch, and firewall
  • root user/sudo user access for discovering Linux and mac devices
  • SCCM Probe requires credentials of an account with db_datareader access to the server. The account should be a local SQL account (not a domain account)


Ports used by the Probe

For the probe to function correctly, the following ports will be used by Freshservice on the Probe’s host machine,

  • Port scan on TCP/135,445,22,161 for all IP addresses/devices configured for scanning to detect the type of device.
  • ICMP to check the device availability
  • Port TCP/135, TCP/445, and a random port for WMI/DCOM
  • Port UDP/137 for Name Services
  • Port TCP/443 for VMWare ESXI Scanning
  • Port TCP/161 for SNMP Network Devices(Default Port)
  • Port 22 for SSH
  • Port TCP/389 or 636 (configurable) to get computers lists and user information from AD
  • Port 1433 for SCCM connection (Default. Can be configured)


What Data is stored

We are using a password-protected SQLite 3.11 database as a data store of the probe. The following data will be stored in the Probe DB (Location can be specified while installing the probe)

  • Domain & IP Range configurations
  • Schedule configurations
  • Device Hardware and Software details
  • User information imported from AD


Data Synchronization (With Freshservice)

     The device and user information is synchronized with Freshservice periodically. By default, the probe uses the HTTPS protocol, and the connection is encrypted and authenticated using a strong protocol (TLS 1.2), a strong key exchange (ECDHE_RSA), and a strong cipher (AES_128_GCM).

If the customer uses a Custom SSL certificate, the encryption may vary.