kstaude asked a question.
Is there any type of whitepaper for which we could use for customers that would be able to provide an overview of the Snow Agent and it's performance?
Many times with customers which are using the Snow Inventory agent, the questions come up regarding performance or metrics before even testing begins. Is there any technical document or white paper that talks about some of this overview? This could be helpful in the pre-sales or early decision phases of a project.
Common items to highlight:
- How data encryption occurs / level of security or encryption
- What data points are collected with examples
- Amount of data collected (i.e. size per snowpack/avg.)
- How long the scan will take on average / range?
- CPU / Memory impact while scanning / not scanning / with metering enabled
Hi Ken, while all this doesn't exist in a single document I have attached two that do exist for your first two questions. The remaining are very open ended questions as they all depend on the system and OS being scanned. Hope this helps.
Thanks Joseph, I've used the document before and helpful but looking for a bit more in the hardware/software data. Regularly for our customers we need to provide all possible data points the agent collects as well as a sample of the data (unencrypted).
Hi Ken, I know what you mean with customers needing to know what is gathered but looking over the Inventory Matrix it does give examples of the data in every field that the agent can possibly gather as far as I am aware of. Sno the only other suggest would be to gather an example Snowpack file from a machine yourself, send this to support to decrypt and provide you by return the raw XML data for you to be able to create your own document.
However this would only provide example data based on what was on the test machine unlike Snow's document that shows examples for all fields.
"Snow's document that shows examples for all fields", does that mean you know of a document that does exist?
Hi Ken, Not sure I follow you. The Inventory Matrix dated 11 Jan 2019 I attached to my reply lists all agent fields gathered, which OS are relevant too and also example of the data that field collected contains. are you looking for something additional in depth to that?
Didn't realize what you posted was an "Inventory Matrix", I've only ever seen the "Compatibility Matrix". I did a search for that document, but wasn't able to find it anywhere in the new Support Hub. Do you have any legacy permalink or current KB for it? Else I may request from @Tom Boyle​ if we can find and post the document.
I never saw it on the KB site. This was provided to me as a Snow Partner directly by an account manager in a specific sales engagement that required answers to an InfoSec team questions like the ones you stated.
And here is the Security one - albeit for INV5 agents but the principles still hold for INV6 agents.