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I'm in charge of a deployment of Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2012 R2. Currently, I'm working through the discovery methods and trying to decide how to enable automatic discovery of systems and users.

On Microsoft's documentation, they warn that Configuration Manager Automatic Discovery traffic can get pretty significant if you aren't careful in your implementation. Can anyone who has used this give me some information on how much traffic I should expect? We currently have around 1000 computers and 4000 user accounts in Active Directory.

Thanks!

AtomicReaction
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This largely depends on your Polling Schedule and your underlying network configuration. If your SCCM Site Server has good connectivity to a Domain Controller and you not using an insanely aggressive Polling Schedule (the default is a full discovery every seven days) you should be fine. You can adjust your Delta Discovery so that your SCCM Resource Records track Active Directory closely without generating a huge amount of network traffic. You also need to be aware that do a full Discovery is resource intensive for the SCCM server itself.

Our organization is a little smaller, but not much, and we are fine. Our networking team is a separate organizational entity so I can't get you concrete metrics without a ticket but it is minimal enough that it has never been an issue. Start with a the default Polling Schedule and a conservative Delta Discovery schedule (maybe every 30 minutes?) and do some benchmarking with your network team. You can then increase your delta schedule to me more frequent. You can also set which attributes your Discovery is interested in to further fine tune the process (why poll attributes you don't care about?).

Take to note to remember that while Delta Discovery will detect new items in Active Directory it will not detect deleted ones (with the exception of Active Directory Group Discovery).

  • Much appreciated. So long as I don't need to expect a massive blast right off the bat, I'm thinking I can just run a conservative discovery and be fine. I doubt we will be running every single station at once, so it shouldn't be too hard for me to just run discovery on smaller sections. – AtomicReaction Nov 05 '13 at 17:22