Device Role for Cloud Instances

[mmfish1]

How do you get the device role for cloud instances? Does it come from the connector or from the FN Inventory Agent?

[lajanakiram]

Hi @mmfish1 , 

The device role is captured by the agent and the connector fetches the details related to instance ID, region, type, Availability type  & zone.. etc  , To get the hosted in information you need to use the connector and for AWS EC2 instances the Agent needs to be deployed to get the mapping.

[kclausen]

@mmfish1 - When you say "Device Role", are you referring to whether the server is Production, Development, Cold Standby, etc.?  If yes, then these values must come from some external source of data, such as as CMDB.

If you mean the "Hosted In" field, which indicates of an inventory device is On-Premises, Azure, Amazon, etc., then this is set automatically when the Flexera Agent is used on an Amazon EC2 instance or an Azure instance.

[mmfish1]

Yes, I want to know if the device is in Production, Test, Dev/IT etc as that impacts the licensing.

[mmfish1]

I'm looking for this information for cloud devices. We get this information from our on-prem devices from CMDB.

[kclausen]

@mmfish1 - The device role cannot be determined just by looking at inventory.  We would need some internal source of data that is then imported as CSV/Excel into Flexera One using a Business Adapter to update the status of computers that are not production. 

How are you tracking the Device Role of your On-Premises and Cloud servers today?

[mmfish1]

We currently use our CMDB for on-prem servers to update the device role in FNMS. We are now trying to figure out how to get that data for the cloud servers. We currently do NOT have cloud servers in our CMDB.

[darren_haehnel]

In our environment we do not use the AWS connector.  We have a consolidated list of all instances across all of our accounts in an S3 bucket that gets refreshed daily.  Within that data is a field for the environment and we have a mapping table that maps those values to the FNMS Device Roles.  It's not perfect as the environment field is free form text so we have to update the mappings when new values appear.  We have some automation that looks up each devices serial number in FNMS to see if the new mapped value matches.  If there's a difference, the entry makes it onto a worksheet that gets saved to the server and processed by a business importer which sets the new values.