Beacon Inventory

[john_kobayashi]

Does an inventory beacon automatically report inventory for itself or does the user/customer have to manually invoke the ndtrack for the beacon server?   My understanding is the beacon does not ever report inventory and manual intervention is required to take inventory for the beacon.

In the customer FNMS tenant in question, 1 of the 3 beacons has reported inventory but the other 2 have not.  But the customer claims they have not invoked ndtrack on any of the beacons so the question is why is one of the beacons reporting inventory ?

[adrian_ritz1]

Hi,

Please check this thread:

https://community.flexera.com/t5/FlexNet-Manager-Forum/Way-to-prevent-agent-from-breaking-a-Inventory-Beacon/td-p/112350/page/2

[statler]

Hi John,

By default, when you install a Beacon, Beacon the installer will install the Flexera agent, too.

However, the Flexera agent on a Beacon will be installed in a different path (%ProgramFilesx86%\Flexera Software\Inventory Beacon\Tracker). Also, as the Beacon itself will not be operational at install time yet, the Flexera agent will not have any configuration information (policy) and will not run on a schedule.

One way to deal with this:

1. Configure the Beacon including configuration of a web server (will usually be IIS these days)
2. Manually run the Policy Client on your Beacon using an elevated command prompt.

mgsPolicy -t machine -o DownloadRootURL=http://<YourBeaconFQDNName>/ManageSoftDL

The policy client on a Beacon can be found in the following folder:
%ProgramFilesx86%\Flexera Software\Inventory Beacon\Policy Client

After downloading the Policy, the Flexera agent on the Beacon will run on a schedule and will download all configuration settings using the Policy like all other agents in the organization.

Please note that you may want to restrict the Beacons to be used for uploading the Inventory data specifically for this agent. The new feature to restrict Inventory agent communication to selected Beacon(s) that has become available with FNMS 2019 R2 can be used for this purpose.

[john_kobayashi]

I knew that parts of the agent was installed with the Beacon.    From your response, I can conclude that it is not possible to see Beacon inventory within FNMS unless someone manually runs the agent on the beacon or sets up the policy for the beacon.   Therefore, I can only conclude that the customer has mistakenly run the agent on the beacon.  

[statler]

Hi John,

Actually, a full Flexera Agent is installed on each Beacon including the Windows services required for running the Agent on a schedule and for collecting usage data if you run the Beacon installer with default settings.

You can do a custom installation of the Beacon and deselect the Flexera agent. This will also prevent installation of the additional Windows services.

And yes, if you see Inventory data from one of your Beacons, it looks as if somebody has "mistakenly" run a Flexera Agent on that Beacon.

[Tooling42]

Hi,

I'm pretty sure, the default setting is that the agent on a beacon is not running without an action or scheduled task created from the administrator. If you don't like the beacon as device in your inventory report, simple set it to 'ignore'.

[mrichardson]

The advice given previously is correct, the agent components are installed by default however it does not download agent policy; this is intentional as trying to run agent policy on the beacon can cause other issues so I would not recommend running the policy agent.

Instead, simply schedule ndtrack to run as a scheduled task and particularly in a multi-tenant environment, ensure that the "MachineInventoryDirectory" preference points to the Incoming\Inventories folder and then the ndis will be uploaded along with the others.

With regards uninstalling the agent components, this is also not recommended if the beacon is used to upload ndi files from agents as the agent components includes ndupload.exe which is what the "Upload Flexera logs and inventories" scheduled task uses.

[john_kobayashi]

Just to close the loop on this.  I was able to get on the beacon with the customer and find the discovery/inventory rule logs that showed that an inventory rule ran and captured beacon inventory.    So, as per this thread discussion, the customer inadvertently ran a inventory rule which captured inventory from the Beacon.