Is there such a thing as Agentless Discorvery?

[ellie_Katz]

We are just at the begining stages with this product and our upper management seems to remember during their initial talks with Flexera that an Agentless Discovery was mentioned.  I did an initial search in the community and couldn't find information pertaining to it.  In all the training's I've taken online it only talks about how the data is gathered once the agents are installed so that leads me to believe that what Flexera can't see it can't track - is that correct?

[tbesse]

Hi Ellie,

There is indeed an option to collect inventory using the remote scan option. This is executed from a Beacon and does not require an agent permanently installed on the target machine. The Gathering FlexNet Inventory guide has all the details about it, it is attached to the welcome page of the online help. It is referred to as zero-footprint or agentless.

I hope this helps,

Thorsten

[ellie_Katz]

Thank you for the quick response!  I will go check out the Gathering FlexNet Inventory guide right now!

[JensWalton]

Ellie

As Thorsten stated, the 'Zero Footprint' option does not use a permanent agent....it does however temporarily install the agent for the duration of the scan.  Depending on the nature of your business, even a temporary agent install may be an area of concern for the device owners.

The temporary agent does not require a lot of space to execute and does not consume a lot of network bandwidth when transmitting the data back to the inventory beacon.

It may be worth using a small test to satisfy any network concerns (if any) to help push this inventory collection method through.

Jens

[ellie_Katz]

Jens

Thank you for the clarification!  I was reading the document and confusing myself because I thought it sounded as if there still had to be an agent installed at some point and time, if even just temporarily.  These particular seemingly minor details are actually very important to our team as we are just starting to understand the product!

Ellie

[mag00_75]

We use different techniques for different purposes that might also help you, some examples.

1: Traditional full blown agent installation on Win servers and clients

2: Zero touch client triggered by a powershell script on reboot for clients on a segmented testbed network. Where we have a file server as a gateway between the networks. Then the full agent performs the upload to beacon.

3: Standalone scanner.exe / ndtrack.sh on Windows Terminal Server and Linux servers. Triggered to run by a scheduler which could be Cron, msched, ansible towers, ...  Especially for the linux technicians this solution helped us in convincing them to have inventory with high permissions.

[kathyartis]

Magnus,

Is there any way to detect a server in the environment that has NOT been brought in as an asset and does NOT have an agent? 

Thanks.

[tbesse]

Hi Kathy,

Yes, the discovery process can scan for devices on the network. this is configured in Discovery & Inventory rules section in the user interface. Have a look there and also at the associated online help (click on the question mark).

Best regards

Thorsten

[mfranz]

Please keep in mind that most automated discovery methods might be limited by network routing and firewalls. Unfortunately there is no simply solution to that. Sources such as Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, etc. can help to discover additional machines, but gathering the data and processing it will take some effort.

[smullins]

Also, for a quick summary of the primary inventory methods you can also refer to the section on "Collect & Import Inventory with FlexNet Manager" under the Discovery and Inventory track for FlexNet Manager in the Learning Center from: Learning Center > FlexNet Manager > Discovery & Inventory > Collect & Import Inventory with FlexNet Manager