Discovery is about uncovering dependencies between applications, devices, users and workloads. So discovery is really all about providing visibility then – Visibility is the end-goal.

And whilst agentless discovery solutions (a.k.a traditional network scanning) promises visibility using a combination of discovery, profiling and classification techniques, reality couldn’t be further from the truth. Operational challenges of placing network appliances or probes across multi-site environments leaves islands of visibility, and not providing that comprehensive view that you were looking for. It can also expensive, and sometimes impossible to place packet-capture everywhere you need.

Visibility on dependencies are also limited through agentless/network solutions – even if you see traffic flows from Server A to Server B, there is no way to tell for sure if the traffic is part of Application A or Application B.