When troubleshooting permission issues, what must be examined?

When troubleshooting permission issues, examining community strings is crucial because they are fundamental to network management protocols such as SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). Community strings act like passwords that control access to the data on devices that support these protocols. If the community string is misconfigured or incorrect, the discovery process may fail to access essential data, thus leading to permission issues.

In the context of ServiceNow Discovery, proper configuration of community strings ensures that the discovery tool can communicate with network devices effectively and retrieve the necessary information about those devices. It's through this access that Discovery can gather configuration and state information essential for creating a comprehensive inventory.

While probe settings, device IPs, and sensor types are also vital elements in the discovery process, they play a different role. Probe settings dictate how probes gather information, device IPs identify which devices should be queried, and sensor types define how the information from the devices is interpreted once gathered. However, if the correct community strings aren't in place, none of these other factors can come into play effectively, as they will be unable to access the required data at the first step of procedural execution. Hence, community strings are particularly significant when dealing with permission-related challenges in discovery processes.