[en] The Canadian Light Source (CLS) uses the EPICS Distributed Control System (DCS) for control and feedback of a linear accelerator, booster ring, electron storage ring, and numerous x-ray beamlines. The number of host computers running EPICS IOC applications has grown to over 200, and the number of IOC applications exceeds 700. The first part of this paper will present the challenges and current efforts to monitor and report the status of the control system itself by monitoring the EPICS network traffic. This approach does not require any configuration or application modification to report the currently active applications, and then provide notification of any changes. The second part will cover the plans to use the information collected dynamically to improve upon the information gathered by process variable crawlers for an IRMIS database, with the goal to eventually replace the process variable crawlers. (author)