Improving automated discovery of inventory, includes obtaining a discovery message from a network device, wherein the discovery message identifies an identifier, a location, and one or more capabilities of the network device, wherein the discovery message is detected by a management instrumentation discovery (MID) server, automatically modifying a data structure of an inventory data store to include the identifier, the location, and the one or more capabilities based on the discovery message, wherein the inventory data store identifies enterprise assets and configurations of the enterprise assets, and providing the modified data structure of the inventory data store to a controller such that the network device is usable by the controller.