Device Monitoring Blueprint

This technical blueprint demonstrates how to integrate Device Monitoring directly onto customer-premises equipment (CPE), branded routers, and edge appliances. The adjacent dashboard widget illustrates how raw, cryptic MAC addresses and vendor data are transformed into a clean, human-readable user interface (UI).

Integrators can fingerprint and map network devices in near real time, eliminating the need to build complex custom data-processing pipelines.

Delivering Customer Value Through Device Visibility

Netify's Device Discovery forms a baseline for the Device Monitoring Blueprint. By exposing actionable insights like live device inventories, detailed hardware profiling, and proactive security alerts, integrators can easily differentiate their offering and unlock new opportunities for premium tiers and recurring add-on services.

Netify device discovery identifying devices on a local network

How It Works

Data Collection Engine

At its core, the Device Discovery Plugin passively captures rich network telemetry to build precise, per-device behavioral profiles. It extracts critical identification signals - including JA4 TLS client hashes, HTTP/SSDP user agents, mDNS service announcements, and DHCP fingerprints - providing the granular data foundation required for accurate device classification and enrichment.

Cloud Integration

Engineered for flexibility, this device telemetry streams directly into third-party fingerprinting platforms like Fing and Fingerbank, or your own proprietary data pipelines. Integrators can also leverage our turnkey, no-code connection to the Netify Cloud, enabling a fully functional device discovery solution in minutes for rapid proof-of-concept deployments.

Value Added Features

This blueprint provides a pathway to provide the following features.

New Device Alerts

Flag unrecognized devices when they join the network using signals from DHCP, SSDP, mDNS, HTTP, and other protocols.

Device Inventory

Maintain a continuously updated inventory of both persistent and transient devices without relying on periodic manual scans.

Device Metadata

Collect the device metadata required for device identification and fingerprinting.

Harmonized Experience

Integrate branding across the network stack instead managing different silos, e.g. a Sonos device streaming Sonos audio.

Requirements

To implement the Device Monitoring blueprint, include the following components:

Install and configure the Netify Agent
Install and configure the Device Discovery Plugin
Install and configure a Sink Plugin for the telemetry
User interface integration

Configuration

Device Discovery Plugin

The Device Discovery Plugin documentation includes an example configuration to get you started quickly. In practice, the right MAC collection policy, fingerprint limits (JA4 clients, mDNS services, HTTP/SSDP user agents), and memory/device caps depend on the size of the network and the hardware it runs on. Contact us and our team will help you determine the best engine configuration for your environment.

Device Telemetry

Unlike a single DPI classification event, a device record builds up over time as the agent observes more traffic from a MAC address. Confidence increases as more distinguishing protocols and fingerprints are collected, and the record is periodically re-published as it is enriched.

A new device is only registered once it is confirmed local to the network and at least one flow using DHCP, SSDP, mDNS, or HTTP has been identified for it.

Available Sink Plugins

Once generated, device telemetry needs a delivery path off the network appliance. The Netify Agent's Sink plugins handle that final step:

Log: Local filesystem.
HTTP: HTTP/S to an API endpoint.
MQTT: Message queue servers.
Socket: File sockets, TCP sockets, or WebSockets.
ubus: OpenWrt ubus.
Custom: Custom sink plugin.

Example: Device Discovery Record

{
    "mac": "9c:6b:00:30:a2:f0",
    "is_local": false,
    "is_multicast": false,
    "oui": {
        "prefix": "9c:6b:00",
        "type": "MA-L",
        "vendor": "ASRock"
    },
    "discovery": {
        "label": "Windows 10/Server 2016",
        "score": 76,
        "entity": {
            "id": 11022,
            "tag": "windows",
            "label": "Windows",
            "category": {
                "id": 31,
                "tag": "os-software-updates",
                "label": "OS/Software Updates"
            },
            "favicon": "https://static.netify.ai/l...",
            "icon": "https://static.netify.ai/l...",
            "logo": "https://static.netify.ai/l...",
            "favicon_source": "app",
            "icon_source": "app",
            "logo_source": "app"
        },
        "type": {
            "id": 1900,
            "label": "Computer"
        },
        "os": {
            "id": 100,
            "label": "Windows",
            "version": "10 or 11"
        }
    }
},

Conclusion

Device Monitoring gives end customers instant clarity into what is running on their network. By leveraging the Netify Agent's fingerprinting and discovery capabilities alongside a mobile or web portal, you can roll out a live network map in a fraction of the time.