Discovery & Inventory

The Directory holds two different kinds of thing, and the distinction matters for every consumer of the directory:

Catalog resources — what you have declared. Created by hand, seeded by setup.sh, or promoted from a discovery result. These get LDAP access groups, appear in the Catalog, and are the only hosts the jump host will connect you to.
Discovered resources — what the network reports. Produced by discovery plugins and shown on the Discovered Inventory tab. They are a queue of “this exists, do you want to manage it?”, not infrastructure you have committed to.

A resource is discovery-only when its metadata.discovery_sources is non-empty and it has never been promoted. Promoting sets metadata.managed = true, at which point it becomes catalog content like any other resource.

Nothing grants access to a discovered resource. It carries no groups until it is promoted, and the jump host applies the same rule — an unpromoted Proxmox guest is not a jump target.

Where discovered data comes from

Source	What it reports
Proxmox	The cluster endpoint, its nodes, and every VM/LXC with NICs, `vmid` and node
UniFi	Network devices and connected clients, by MAC
nmap	Hosts and open ports on a target range
Docker	Containers on a local or remote daemon
theta-agent	The host it runs on — OS, kernel, CPU, RAM, disk, addresses
ldap-client	A Linux host registering itself when it joins

An agent is the most authoritative of these: it runs on the machine it describes. A network scan is the least — it only knows what answered.

How results are matched to existing resources

Every source runs through one reconciler, so two sources seeing the same machine converge on one resource instead of creating duplicates. Matching is tried in order of precision:

MAC address — the strongest signal, compared across every interface.
IP address — any address on any interface, plus metadata.address.
Slug, name, or base hostname — last resort.

A candidate must also be the same kind. Without that guard a discovered VM named gitea-runner would match a hand-created service of the same name on rule 3 and overwrite it. (template counts as host: converting a VM to a template is the same machine.)

When a match is found the metadata is merged, interfaces are unioned by MAC, and the source is added to discovery_sources — so a resource can legitimately read ["unifi", "proxmox"], meaning two independent sources agree it exists.

Naming

Sources disagree about names, so the most human one wins: a hostname beats an IP-shaped name, which beats a MAC-shaped name; length is only a tie-break within a rank. This is why a device UniFi knows only as ac:16:2d:b3:da:80 is renamed dl380-0 once Proxmox reports it.

Relationships

Plugins emit edges as well as resources (a Proxmox node under its cluster endpoint, a guest under its node). The reconciler refuses any edge that would make a resource its own parent, or that would close a loop — a cycle renders as an infinitely nested tree and breaks every ancestor walk in the app.

Promoting a discovered resource

On the Discovered Inventory tab, press Promote. The resource form opens pre-filled with what was discovered — name, kind, address, subtype — so you can correct it before committing. Saving marks it managed and provisions its LDAP groups.

Each row shows what the directory knows about the device: its source(s), its vmid where applicable, the identifier it has at that source (sourceId, e.g. dl380-0/qemu/234), and every interface with its MAC and address. If a row looks wrong, that detail is where to start.

Stale results

Resources that are only auto-discovered are garbage-collected: if a source stops reporting one for long enough it is marked lifecycle_state: "archived" rather than deleted. Anything you created or promoted is never touched — manual in discovery_sources exempts it.

A Proxmox node that is powered off is still reported (with its status), so downtime does not look like decommissioning.

What the stack discovers about itself

setup.sh seeds its own components as catalog resources — the site, the stack host, theta-proxy and theta-jump, and the services under them. The Docker discovery plugin then finds the containers backing them. Containers belonging to the theta-suite compose project are recognised and attached to the service they implement rather than appearing as unmanaged strangers, so a fresh install has an empty Discovered Inventory rather than five things demanding attention.