Automatic discovery detects and collects signal data from third-party services, such as databases and web servers. Through auto discovery the Collector automatically generates a configuration snippet that you can modify and incorporate into your existing configuration to retrieve your services’ data.

Via automatic discovery you can also enable zero-code instrumentation of back-end applications, which allows the Collector to retrieve data from application language runtimes without having to modify the source application code or adding any new installation or configuration steps. With this option you won’t have to install and configure your instrumentation agents separately. Zero-code instrumentation using the Collector’s automatic discovery feature is only available for the Java, Node.js, and .NET language runtimes. Alternatively you can deploy zero-code instrumentation independently from the Collector for 8 back-end languages, as described in Instrument back-end applications to send spans to Splunk APM.