Using Device Roles

In This Section Configuring device role settings Configuring device role identification settings Using the percent variables in the Discovery Console Managing device roles

When WhatsUp Gold discovers devices, it tries to determine the type of device so that it can monitor the device appropriately. To determine the type of device, WhatsUp Gold compares the discovered attributes of the device to a set of criteria called a device role.

Device roles do two things:

• Specify the criteria that a device must match to be identified as the device role.
• Specify the monitoring configuration that is applied to the device when it is added to WhatsUp Gold.

WhatsUp Gold provides several default device roles that are used to identify most common network devices. If your network includes devices that are not identified by this default set, you can create custom device roles.