The first technical requirement of a network auditing agent (such as ENT NetCenter or ENT Network Monitor) is that the network auditing agent must be aware of the machines that you wish to audit or otherwise be able to discover these on the network.
Typically this information is obtained from a directory server or domain controller. However a domain controller is not required. On windows networks, a list of all of the machines on the network can be obtained using NetBIOS over TCP/IP whether a domain controller is present or not.
If you have a domain controller then you should use it. This will be the easiest and quickest way for ENT NetCenter or ENT Network Monitor to discover the machines on your network.
Alternatively you can have the network audit agent ping a set of IP addresses to discover the network devices on the network.
You can find more information on how to configure domains and IP networks in the section of the help files that deals with viewing and modifying network details for networks that you have configured in your ENT Inventory. In this document however, since we're mainly interested in conceptual issues, let's move on and talk about establishing a connection to remote machines during a network audit.
