Agent's default Beacon

[vmnzspark]

We have several Beacon servers in our FNMS infrastructure. Several thousands of Inventory Agents where deployed using 3rd party tool (SCCM).

In the mgssetup.ini DEPLOYSERVERURL is set to url with name of the SCCM server, which has Beacon installed to ensure successful first policy download.

Most of the agents after being deployed and getting policy, have started connecting to other beacon severs as their fist priority beacons. That is according to agents' logs.

The question: Is there a way in FNMS to report on which beacon each agent uses for uploading/downloading? Or, perhaps, - report on all agents for each beacon (the "Devices" tab in beacon's properties does not show that, probably due to 3rd party agent deployment vs Adoption mehod).

[ChrisG]

Information about which beacon(s) an agent has communicated with is not gathered or stored centrally. Agents dynamically prioritize and choose which beacon to communicate with each time a communication is required, and don't have a concept of a "fixed" beacon.

As you've found, info on what beacon is used for any particular download or upload communication can be found in agent logs. I guess if you were really keen and the situation warranted it you could also look at IIS logs on the beacon to see what IP addresses HTTP requests are coming in from, and somehow make use of that information. You would also see hostnames of the computers with the agent installed appearing in these logs in HTTP GET requests for .npl (policy) files and HTTP PUT requests for .ndi (inventory) files.

[vmnzspark]

cgrinton wrote:
...I guess if you were really keen and the situation warranted it you could also look at IIS logs on the beacon...

Thanks for your reply.

I hope you realize the effort of going through IIS log files for chasing agents names having 11-12 thousands of agents (in 1200 subnets) and several beacons, especially when some of the beacons' IISs host other busy web apps as well.

I guess the ability to view current agent's association with a particular beacon (it may be different after each reconciliation, which is OK) would be a great feature to add, at least for load balancing, expansion planning, etc.

[ChrisG]

For further reference, here are a couple of other threads related to this topic:

• Idea ITAM-I-90: Ability to track which beacons inventory came through via the GUI and ability to sum up total number of clients checking into a specific beacon (please vote for this idea if it would be useful to you)
• How can I tell, on a beacon server, which hosts (agent inventory) it handled? (forum discussion)