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Discovery and assessment are two related activities in the initial part of your
migration journey. The ultimate goal of this phase is to gain a deep knowledge
of your existing infrastructure to inform the following planning
and execution phases.
Get a quick overview of discovery and assessment in Google Cloud Migration Center with
the following video.
How discovery works
Discovery is about finding all the components of your
infrastructure, including physical machines, VMs, and databases.
Migration Center provides you with the tools you need to automatically
scan your on-premises infrastructure to identify all of the components that
you need to migrate. For example:
Install the Migration Center discovery client to collect data
for multiple days, to get complete and detailed information about your
infrastructure.
Use the command line tool, mcdc CLI, to perform
a one-off scan of your infrastructure, such as your VMware environment.
Run automated scripts to collect data from other cloud providers or
from databases, then import the data into Migration Center
for further assessment.
A typical discovery can take on average a few weeks to complete.
How infrastructure assessment works
After you've completed the discovery step and collected your infrastructure
data into Migration Center, you group the servers and databases that
you want to migrate based on your application or business objective.
Then, you create different migration preferences to compare different scenarios.
Finally, you generate a total cost of ownership (TCO) report to compare
different target products and their costs.
With Migration Center, you can do the following:
Generate detailed reports on all the aspects of your infrastructure.
Identify application and network dependencies to learn which components
you must migrate together.
Get suggestions on the Google Cloud products to migrate your assets to,
and find out the costs in advance.
Get personalized recommendations to reduce costs and improve
performance in your Google Cloud environment.
[[["Easy to understand","easyToUnderstand","thumb-up"],["Solved my problem","solvedMyProblem","thumb-up"],["Other","otherUp","thumb-up"]],[["Hard to understand","hardToUnderstand","thumb-down"],["Incorrect information or sample code","incorrectInformationOrSampleCode","thumb-down"],["Missing the information/samples I need","missingTheInformationSamplesINeed","thumb-down"],["Other","otherDown","thumb-down"]],["Last updated 2025-08-29 UTC."],[],[],null,["# About infrastructure discovery and assessment\n\nDiscovery and assessment are two related activities in the initial part of your\nmigration journey. The ultimate goal of this phase is to gain a deep knowledge\nof your existing infrastructure to inform the following planning\nand execution phases.\n\nGet a quick overview of discovery and assessment in Google Cloud Migration Center with\nthe following video.\n\nHow discovery works\n-------------------\n\nDiscovery is about finding all the components of your\ninfrastructure, including physical machines, VMs, and databases.\n\nMigration Center provides you with the tools you need to automatically\nscan your on-premises infrastructure to identify all of the components that\nyou need to migrate. For example:\n\n- Install the Migration Center discovery client to collect data for multiple days, to get complete and detailed information about your infrastructure.\n- Use the command line tool, `mcdc` CLI, to perform a one-off scan of your infrastructure, such as your VMware environment.\n- Run automated scripts to collect data from other cloud providers or from databases, then import the data into Migration Center for further assessment.\n\nA typical discovery can take on average a few weeks to complete.\n\nHow infrastructure assessment works\n-----------------------------------\n\nAfter you've completed the discovery step and collected your infrastructure\ndata into Migration Center, you group the servers and databases that\nyou want to migrate based on your application or business objective.\nThen, you create different migration preferences to compare different scenarios.\nFinally, you generate a total cost of ownership (TCO) report to compare\ndifferent target products and their costs.\n\nWith Migration Center, you can do the following:\n\n- Generate detailed reports on all the aspects of your infrastructure.\n- Identify application and network dependencies to learn which components you must migrate together.\n- Get suggestions on the Google Cloud products to migrate your assets to, and find out the costs in advance.\n- Get personalized recommendations to reduce costs and improve performance in your Google Cloud environment.\n\nWhat's next\n-----------\n\n- Learn how to [get started with Migration Center](/migration-center/docs/get-started-with-migration-center)."]]
