FlexNet Manager Suite Inventory/Discovery capabilities

[iammanzi]

Good day 

I have a question on Inventory/Discovery capabilities by FlexNet Manager Suite around:

• Container Technologies like Dockers, Containers, Kubernetes
• Micro services
• Network software discoveries

Can these be done currently and if not, is there a roadmap for this?

regards

Manish

[mfranz]

Hi Manish,

Regarding Containers there has been a little discussion: https://community.flexera.com/t5/FlexNet-Manager-Forum/Software-discovery-in-docker-containers/m-p/108691

There is currently no discovery functionality in FNMS. But even if you had one, you still would depend on many other apspects of your environment. Like for every other discovery you'll need correct routing and access rights (firewall). If these aren't given, your discovery will fail.

The alternative would be, to make sure you (SAM) are included in (or at least informed about)

• general/specific architectural and design decissions
• software lifecycle processes
• procurement
• etc.

Making sure that the use of such technology is documented (in a CMDB) in a transparent way, would be benefical too.

Best regards,

Markward

[ChrisG]

In relation to discovery of microservices: microservices are an architectural concept used in software systems. You would need to know a whole lot more about the particular microservices in question to consider how they might be discovered. It would very much depend on the particular technology stack the microservices are built on.

Similarly, the term "network software" is pretty broad and could be used to cover all sorts of different things. In a simple case, this might just be some software that is placed on a file share on the network and run from there. Or it may refer to something much more complex. Strategies you would use for discovery would depend on the particular scenario you have in mind.

[ChrisG]

For future reference for anybody looking at this thread, some support for discovering and gathering inventory from Docker containers on Linux has been added in the FlexNet Manager Suite 2020 R1 release. See the following post for more information: Discovery and Inventory of Docker Containers in Flexnet Manager Suite 2020 R1