Compatibility between Snow Agent and SIM Connector

March 29, 2019 at 7:00 AM

When the SIM Connectors send data to the Inventory Server, it overwrites the data previously send by the Snow Agents. Can the data from the connector add to the data from the agent instead of replacing it? Example : Our Windows servers all have an agent running and they scan at 9am local time . At 12pm (EST), the Hyper-V connector runs and send data on the Hyper-V servers. This data seems to overwrite anything for those servers that was sent earlier by the agents. As a result, during the DUJ at 9pm (EST), the DUJ runs and only takes data from the SIM connector. I end up with servers that only have an OS and no other application installed. The issues are: The SIM connector does not bring information about installed applications The SIM connector does not bring information about metering The SIM and the local Snow Agent run on different schedules (the Agent runs on local time) If the Connector reports last, then it is not possible to trigger a scan from the SMACC manually

SamuelBaughan
7 years ago
Or could it be that those do not have an agent at all? Not sure how I could check that since I have no access to those servers. If no one sees the same behaviour, then it could be my servers that have missed the push for the agent ...
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- Gert-Jan Kosterman
  7 years ago
  Hi Samuel, I assume these systems are not Domain joined and so not in the AD? Otherwise you could setup the Active Directory Discovery on the Inventory server and check the report 'Computers that are not inventoried' but you probably checked that already kind regards, Gert-Jan.
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  - SamuelBaughan
    7 years ago
    Hi Gert, Thanks for this suggestion. Yes, I have the AD Discovery running every week but those computers are "inventoried" ... but only through the SIM. I checked and it seems those servers are confirmed as "without Snow agent", which explains the discrepancy in the data. The good news is that they are easy to spot in SLM because the "Client Version" for those is the version of the SIM (5.13 or 5.14) instead of the version of the agent (6.0.2 or 6.1.0).
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Geoffrey Macquet (Flexera Software)
7 years ago
Hi ‌, Usually if you do an inventory of the same device through two "tools" the data of the latest aggregated replaces the actual data. So if the agent reports in the morning information about Computer1, the information A,B and C, and the SIM reports information about this same Computer1 containing information A and B, it will replace these. C will not be affected and remain there. However, since you report that there is no information about metering/software at all, eventually you might have missed the agent push to these servers, since this would (typically) not be overwritten by empty rows from the SIM data. Since the reported agent data is usually the best quality, you would want to schedule it to scan the device after the SIM aggregation. Note that we recommend to scan a device through one inventory source than multiple to avoid conflicts, data quality loss, etc. Let me know if that helps! Best Regards Geoffrey Macquet Customer Success Manager EMEA
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Portal User
7 years ago
The Hyper-V connector should not overwrite any software data from the agents, no matter in which order the both sources send in data. This behaviour is a bit different depending on the sources we are talking about, the SCCM connector and the Snow Agent will overwrite each other, but not the agent and the Hyper-V or vmWare connectors. This KB describes the way different source data is handled (what is merged, overwritten and appended) : KB0012035 I think you might be right about not having the agent installed on these computers.
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SamuelBaughan
7 years ago
Thanks and ,‌ You are pointing me in the right direction I'm sure. I managed to get someone help me by getting info from at least one of those servers and guess what: the agent was missing. Thanks to both for explaining what overwrites what. It is very helpful. I think I can mark that question as answer in view of the above.
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