Inventory 5 in a hosted environment

mary.barr1 asked a question.

June 9, 2017 at 7:00 AM

I've seen Inventory 5 set up in an enterprise edition / locally installed environment but I'm hosted. I've heard the partner I'm hosted by is in the process of moving to Inv5. I understand that each partner may not take on administering all the new functionality but I would like to know how that changes in an SPE/hosted environment. For example,

I know Inv5-based clients can be updated, managed, and deployed via SMaCC in an enterprise edition. Since we're hosted, I would not have access to the partner's server to do that for myself. I'll need to continue my current process of having my clients created by Snow or the Partner.
I know uniqueness of a computer/device is derived a bit differently; sounds like there's less fluctuation.I'll need to move to an Inv5-based client to take advantage of this.
I understand there is now a master and a service gateway design. Depending on how the partner chooses to implement this, it may or may not have an impact on my feed to them.
I seem to remember something about being able to gather data from additional avenues, unfortunately I don't remember the details so can't work out if we could take advantage of that yes / no / depends on the Partner.

Have I misunderstood anything?

Am I missing anything good? Bad?

piideleteJune
9 years ago
Hi Mary The Inventory 5 product doesn't yet come in an SPE version so it function the same for the partner as it would locally installed within your own environment. In answer to your raised points: You would need to have the partner to continue to create the clients in the Inventory 5 portal and then push these updated versions out to your estate or have them created by Snow and you deploy the updates via you internal processes. The latter is still within your scope of change control etc. The INV 5 client uses a different identifier to create the unique record in Snow so minimise fluctuations as you say. The Master / Gateway system will be up to how the partner implements their upgrades however the Gateway method does have its advantages in terms of network security as you can then open only a single endpoint to communicate with the partners Master rather than allowing all client endpoints to communicate. The other avenues are the ability to scan SNMP, SSH etc. so these methods add more options to finding the unknown devices on your estate. All in all the move to Inventory v5 is a good one for both partner and customer as it opens up more management options to design your service.
Expand Post
- rswain
  9 years ago
  Hello - what are all of the benefits a company will see when their hosted environment is upgraded to I5? Is there a document that shows that? Thanks.
  Expand Post
  - piideleteJune
    9 years ago
    Randy - I've not seen a full guide showing the differences in a hosted environment but as mentioned currently a partner hosting Inventory 5 is using the same versions and features as if hosted by a customer on premise. The differences would potentially come in how you get the data to the partner in that while on premise you may just have a single master inventory server accepting client data in a partner environment the partner will have the master server and this will accept client data directly or via gateway servers installed on the customers network that "route" their client data. That will all come down you design the communication paths with the partner in line with InfoSec requirements etc.
    Expand Post
    rswain
    9 years ago
    Hello - thanks for the information.
    Expand Post

Related Product Forums