uControlDiscovery Module
Discovery
Continuous, credential-aware IT asset discovery for your entire estate.
The Discovery module finds, identifies, classifies and tracks everything connected to your network — physical hosts, virtual machines, switches, routers, printers, hypervisors, cloud workloads, IoT, and OT (operational-technology) devices — then keeps that picture current as your estate changes. It pairs unauthenticated scanning (port probes, ARP, SSDP/UPnP, mDNS, NetBIOS, public SNMP) with authenticated connectors (SSH for Linux/UNIX and macOS, WinRM, SNMP, VMware vSphere/ESXi, Nutanix Prism, Proxmox VE, TP-Link Omada, and the AWS, Azure and GCP cloud APIs) so you get the broadest possible coverage and the deepest possible detail.
Where to start
Getting Started — architecture options, system requirements, and step-by-step installation for on-premises or cloud deployments.
How Discovery Works — the scan lifecycle, connector model, credential matching, and result normalisation.
User Guide — everyday interface walkthroughs.
Administrator Guide — auth, security, backup, restore.
Key capabilities
Multi-layer scanning — ARP, SSDP/UPnP, mDNS, NetBIOS, public SNMP, port probes, and credentialed deep inspection.
Credential-free recognition — identifies many assets with no credentials at all, using mDNS, SSDP/UPnP, NetBIOS, ARP and public SNMP signals.
OT device discovery — operational-technology assets are a first-class category, found passive-first with opt-in, read-only active identity probes (Modbus / EtherNet-IP).
Passive flow-based discovery — NetFlow / IPFIX traffic materialises assets with no active scan required.
Asset enrichment — vendor / model / OS extraction from SSH banners, SNMP sysDescr, MAC OUI lookups, HTTP(S) appliance fingerprinting, TLS certificate capture, and DNS.
Topology mapping — relationship edges such as HOSTED_ON and COMMUNICATES_WITH visualised per asset.
Network flow monitoring — NetFlow / IPFIX ingestion for traffic-pattern visibility.
Dark-space & shadow-IP detection — surfaces unused address space and unmanaged hosts that appear outside your known targets.
Self-Seed target discovery — proposes new scan targets automatically from observed flow.
Per-credential usage & health tracking — records each credential's last-used time and last authentication result so failing credentials are easy to spot.
Asset aging & lifecycle — automatic state transitions so stale assets don't clutter your inventory.
Worker-based architecture — lightweight agents deploy at customer sites without opening inbound firewall rules.
AI in Discovery
When the optional AI features are enabled, Discovery uses them to:
Diagnose failed scans — the AI inspects run telemetry and suggests the likely cause and the credential or configuration change needed.
Classify unknown endpoints — given the evidence gathered by a scan, the AI suggests the most likely asset type, vendor and OS.
Answer questions about your estate in plain English via the Ask uControl assistant.
Languages
The uControl Insight interface is available in five languages — English, French, German, Spanish and Italian. Each user chooses their language on their Profile page; until they do, the platform uses the global default set under Settings → General.
Setup guides
The Setup Guides section under this page covers specific scenarios — VMware ESXi discovery via SSH, NAT'd environments, and other patterns we see frequently in the field.