Discovery of software running in Tomcat & Websphere web servers

[sissonr]

We have recently run into multiples issues where we cannot discover software, because we have discovered it is running within Tomcat and Websphere web servers. Discussions with the system SME's have indicated the software's installation presence on the servers is as files - .jar or .dll - and that it does not show up within the server's Add/Remove Programs. Thus no installer evidence. 

Our review of FNMS Discovered File Evidence indicates that, although we are discovering files with .jar.sig and .dll.sig file extensions, we are not currently discovering any .jar or .dll file evidence. Additionally, when I check All File Evidence, .jar and .dll don't show up there either (although the x.sig variants do). 

Has anyone else encountered this problem?

[Flex-Jeremy]

Hi Sissonr, 
The reason that you don't see .jar and .dll file evidence is because the Inventory agent does not scan for these file extensions. You can modify this behavior to scan for additional file extensions, however if the .jar.sig and .dll.sig files are for this application then I would recommend linking the existing File Evidence to the appropriate application using an existence rule of 'At Least One'

Otherwise you can add .jar and .dll files to the list of file extensions that the inventory agent scans for by modifying the IncludeExtension parameter to include jar and dll to the default file extension range. You can then manually link this local File Evidence to the appropriate application. Using an existence rule of 'At Least One'

More information about the IncludeExtension parameter can be found in the Gathering FlexNet Inventory guide, linked below.

IncludeExtension
https://docs.flexera.com/FlexNetManagerSuite2023R2/EN/GatherFNInv/index.html#SysRef/FlexNetInventoryAgent/topics/PMD-IncludeExtension.html

I do not recommend making this configuration change to all of your agents, only to the server where you have deployed Tomcat and Websphere. Modifying IncludeExtension to include .dll files will increase the amount of unnecessary file evidence that is collected. The increase in evidence may impact the amount of time that your reconcile takes, as well as increase the amount storage space needed in your Database without a significant benefit to software recognition.

[sissonr]

Thanx! I'll have my team take a look at this.

[ChrisG]

A point to be aware of here is that simply configuring the agent's IncludeExtension preference to gather details of files with particular extensions will enable you to get that data into the inventory SQL database, but the data will not be imported or available as file evidence to use for recognizing application installations - so this approach may not fully meet your needs here.

If are using FlexNet Manager Suite on-premises, you can directly query the inventory database to obtain the raw file details that have been gathered in inventory.

See the following blog post for some discussion about this: Finding installations of Apache Log4j (or other) files on computers with FlexNet Manager Suite

You may also want to consider voting for the following idea which is related to being able to use .jar files for recognizing installations: FXONE-I-460: Log4J and java (.jar) recognition.

[sissonr]

Thanx. I have added my vote.