Configuring agents for large deployments

[flexeranoob]

Dear All,

Another  query from a newbie.  We have a large desktop environment, which would need multiple beacons.  But I would prefer to load each  machine with the exact same agent.  i.e. pointing to the same agent.  I imagine that since the agent looks for the best available beacon to push the upload, it will anyway do a load balancing sort of thing, and push the data to best available beacon.   Let me know if this is how you see it as well.  Or do you guys load up a large single environment with agents pointing to different beacons.

[mrichardson]

There are several ways to configure the beacons.  To answer your question on how the beacons are selected by default, the Gathering Flexnet Inventory guide has a section called "Selecting Inventory Beacons" which has a lot of detail on the topic.  This guide is the 2019 R2 On-Premises guide.

In summary, there is an agent setting which controls this and which can be modified to either dynamically choose a beacon or be restricted to a single beacon, by default, ping is used to contact each known beacon to see which responds fastest and that will then be selected.

I have seen some customers use a load balancer (which is how our cloud works) which means that the agent configuration file just points to the load balancer URL and that will then handle the beacon choice however it should be noted that if there are any issues, Technical Support will ask you to bypass the load balancer to rule out the issue being on the local configuration of that setup.

If you need help configuring the initial agent configuration, that same guide has detailed steps under the "Agent third-party deployment: Details" section.

[bruce_giles]

Hello There,  everyone has a different take on what represents a large deployment but here is an example of our environment. At this point, we do not include our  desktops but have approximately 30,000 servers that have the agent.

Based upon my experience, I do not think you would have any issues if you install the agent on all of the desktops and let the "round robin"  process (as mrichardson explained above)  decide what Beacon to upload the inventory file to. Considering these are desktops, the size of the files will be relatively small so the uploading process will occur quite quickly. You can always monitor things and adjust if necessary but my suspicion is that things will work out just fine using the default process for the inventory file uploads.

The Agent install is pretty straight forward using any of the tools available like SCCM, Tanium and other similar products. Just remember to include the Agent package in all of the Desktop Base Builds so when new desktops are imaged the agent is included.

Hope this helps a bit.. 

Bruce

[mfranz]

Hi,

If you plan the rollout in a complex environment, specifically including multiple beacons, you should consider what @ChrisG wrote in here.

Best regards,

Markward