OS Discovery

How do I properly set up the OS discovery tab in the Network Scanner?

When I scan my network, I am able to see IP addresses, MAC, NIC, and host names just fine. But for every device the operating system comes back as unknown platform.

If you are using OS detection from the Workstation tab, that will only work in a domain environment, with the Network Scanner application run under a domain admin account.

For a network without domains or domain admin, you may be able to get results via Nmap integration. For that, download Nmap from nmap.org, and then set Options - Integration with Nmap - OS detection.

I have integrated Nmap into NetScan and it does detect the OS on some of my devices. However I cannot put this particular device on our domain because we are also using this device to do scans for auditing purposes for our customers. Most of our customers are in a domain environment. Do you have any advice on how I should proceed?

It's not very clear what you meant. So here are two answers:

If you use the device at customer's site and you are given access to their domain and an admin account, the the OS detection from the Workstation tab should work. Alternatively you could use WMI, see Options - Remote WMI - Windows name.

If you are not given any access credentials, then Nmap would be the only option. It uses advanced TCP/IP stack fingerprinting for OS detection that allows you to discover the systems without access credentials.