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Mac OS Agent for Flexnet Invenotory


Hi Dear Community,

I have a few questions on the Mac OS agent for Flexnet inventory :
Could you please help me with the following questions?

1) I would like to know the Mac OS agent compatibility with respect to Mac OS installed : (Mojave, Catalina ). This would be helpful in dealing with the right agent package for the deployment on mac devices running on different OS. Also can you confirm where I will be able to download the package.
2) The Mac users would be prompted with a screen when the agent is supposed to run - can this be removed by any means? Your thoughts?
3) Now we are planning to roll out Mac OS Flexnet agent in a larger scale - to carry forward, I wanted to know is there a way we get a report of the agent consumption on resources on the mac books - cpu,,memory, RAM, etc.
4) How do we determine the schedule runs for the agent installed on the mac devices. At what time the agent actually starts inventory gathering
5) How do we know how long does the agent take to complete an inventory - I would like to have such details equipped on my end.

I will greatly appreciate the responses to these questions.

Many Thanks
Abhilash M

(3) Replies

hi @Cloaky 

I have few inputs on your questions

1. We have latest agent version from FNMS 2019 R2 which will give a separate agent for 64Bit MAC OS which will resolve the pop up issue for the users and package can be downloaded from the FNMS suite if its a cloud version.

winvarma_0-1574771655988.png

https://helpnet.flexerasoftware.com/fnms/EN/features/index_frames.html Please refer to the release notes from flexera for more details.

3. Not sure if the Flexera Agent can give that detailed information on the device based resource utilization which we generally use at a server level using monitoring tools configured.

4. Agent will never stop running on the device and will continuously gather information when ever there is any change in the software installations/user logged in etc and this depends on the inventory schedule task defined by you in the batch/reconciliation schedules and its common for all the agents deployed and not specific to the agent platform like window/now-windows and MAC etc.

5. It depends on many parameters and not sure about the time taken by an agent to collect the inventory and generally that will be with in few minutes.

 

Forum please correct if there were any mistakes

regards,

Varma

 

As points 1-3 have been covered, I'll answer 4 and 5.

4.  This is configured in the UI under Discovery and Inventory -> Settings and allows you to choose what time (in local time) to start inventory collection.  You can also set a range e.g. within 2 hours of 8am which means the start time will be randomised within these rules on each device - See https://helpnet.flexerasoftware.com/FlexNetManagerSuite2019R2/EN/WebHelp/index.html#tasks/InvSet-AgentInvSchedule.html

5) This depends on what you're scanning and what else is running.  On non-windows devices we default to LowProfile mode which has a NICE level of 10 and this means that the agent will use the available idle time to run faster but only until another process needs it. 

There is also the consideration that if you have intensive settings such as file scanning then the config you have chosen will have an impact e.g. scanning all directories and network shares will take significantly longer than scanning a single directory and no network drives.

 

In general, you should expect it to take minutes but there are too many environmental variables to say for definite, this is something you will be able to get a handle on in your environment once you have a few agents configured and running.

Hope this helps.

(Anything expressed here is my own view and not necessarily that of my employer, Flexera)
If the solution provided has helped, please mark it as such as this helps everyone to know what works.

@mrichardson@winvarma   Thank you so much! This was a handful!