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Automatic Discovery

Automatic discovery allows devices and device profiles to be found and automatically added to Edge Xpert. This feature can greatly minimize the configuration required to locate and onboard devices in a specific deployment scenario and can help to simplify the roll out of the solution at scale.

The following device services support the automatic discovery of devices:

The following device services support the automatic discovery of device profiles:

Enable Automatic Discovery

You can enable or disable automatic discovery with the DEVICE_DISCOVERY_ENABLED environment variable. For example, it can be enabled as follows:

version: '3.7'

services:
  device-bacnet-ip:
    environment:
      DEVICE_DISCOVERY_ENABLED: 'true'

Once enabled, you can create a provision watcher. This searches for devices and device profiles that match the supplied identifiers. For more information on provision watchers, see Provision Watcher.

Provision watchers can be created both in Edge Xpert Manager and through the REST API with curl commands.

Configurable Properties

The following properties are required when adding a provision watcher:

Property Name REST API Field Description
Name name Name of the provision watcher
Description description Description of the provision watcher
Admin State adminState Indicates whether the device is LOCKED or UNLOCKED
Identifiers identifiers Used to filter devices with specified protocol properties, values can be regular expressions
Blocking Identifiers blockingIdentifiers Used to block devices with specified protocol properties
Service Name serviceName Name of the device service to which discovered devices should be added
Profile Name profileName Name of the device profile that should be applied to the devices
Protocol Name protocolName Name of the protocol on which discovered devices communicates

Customize Device Information

It is possible to set up templates that will customize the onboarded devices based on their discovered metadata. For example, the name of a device as onboarded to the platform can be automatically set based on properties that are found during the discovery process.

These can be set with the following optional properties:

Property Name REST API Field Description
Device Name Template deviceNameTemplate Used to override the device name with a custom name format
Device Labels deviceLabels Used to override the device labels
Device Description deviceDescription Description of the discovered device

Customize Device Profile Information

It is possible to set up templates that will customize the BACnet/IP and OPC-UA device profiles based on their discovered metadata. For example, the name of a device profile can be automatically set based on properties that are found during the discovery process.

These can be set with the following optional properties:

Property Name REST API Field Description
Profile Name Template profileNameTemplate Used to override the profile name
Profile Labels profileLabels Used to override the profile labels
Profile Description profileDescription Description of the discovered profile