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Need help in Understanding the Inventory Imports

I would like to understand how Inventory Imports work, something like a workflow from where it exactly starts and where it ends and what executables does it use to perform those activities and where does the log get saved. and if there is any intermediate data which Flexera saves, where does that get saved! We are having Inventory imports configured and are being in progress from past 4 days continuously and couldnt find any error, it is getting timedout error during the importing Inventory devices step itself.

Thanks in Advance,

Srikanth M 

(1) Solution

Hi @sree335 ,

Here's a rough pass at this:

  1. Inventory gathered by agent and uploaded to ManageSoftRL on beacon which puts it in the Incoming\Inventories folder
  2. The "Upload Flexera logs and inventories" scheduled task uploads it to ManageSoftRL on the Inventory Server
  3. Once it hits the Inventory server it is automatically processed into the Inventory database via IIS web handlers.
  4. When the Importing Inventory devices step runs, the compliancereader.exe process is triggered via the batch scheduler which will start the "Reader" processes where it goes through each data source (of which the Inventory database is one) to pull all of the inventory data into the tables starting with "Importedxxx" in the Compliance database
  5. Once all data sources are imported, the Writer phase begins which merges all of the data from sources into normalised records.
  6. The License Reconcile process then calculates the license position based on the normalised inventory data and purchase data.

On our cloud, steps 3-6 happen behind the scenes on Flexera's side.

 

For non-FNMS sources, the beacon collects it and the "Upload 3rd party inventory data" scheduled task uploads the data to the batch server component which automatically triggers the relevant reader for that source (see step 4) which depending on settings may then automatically trigger the writers and then the reconciliation.

Is this more what you're looking for?

(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.

View solution in original post

(7) Replies

I have some half-baked training documentation on this I can provide, once I clean it up I will post it to the thread.

most of the information your after will be in the gatheringflexnetinventoryguide, I have attatched a copy for the latest FNMS version, check out chapter one in particular "Understanding what, where how and why"

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dave-collins-7aa71a3b

You may also find the "Server Scheduling" chapter of the System Reference PDF useful to understand more. This chapter covers scheduling of many server-side in general, and is not specifically focused on just the inventory import processing which are you asking about here. However it will provide you with more context around how batch processing in the system works.

(Did my reply solve the question? Click "ACCEPT AS SOLUTION" to help others find answers faster. Liked something? Click "KUDO". Anything expressed here is my own view and not necessarily that of my employer, Flexera.)

That document mostly covers about FNMS agent and how it can be installed and what does it has! I am taking about in general like once the inventory has been gathered either by third party or the Adapter or FNMS Agent and then once gathered it will be uploaded to Application server(incase of Central Application environment) or Batch Processing Server(incase of Multi server environment) and then it will be sent to Staging DB and from there the step Importing Inventory Device appears.

I am talking about that last step, importing Inventory devices, please help me in understanding

Hi @sree335 ,

Here's a rough pass at this:

  1. Inventory gathered by agent and uploaded to ManageSoftRL on beacon which puts it in the Incoming\Inventories folder
  2. The "Upload Flexera logs and inventories" scheduled task uploads it to ManageSoftRL on the Inventory Server
  3. Once it hits the Inventory server it is automatically processed into the Inventory database via IIS web handlers.
  4. When the Importing Inventory devices step runs, the compliancereader.exe process is triggered via the batch scheduler which will start the "Reader" processes where it goes through each data source (of which the Inventory database is one) to pull all of the inventory data into the tables starting with "Importedxxx" in the Compliance database
  5. Once all data sources are imported, the Writer phase begins which merges all of the data from sources into normalised records.
  6. The License Reconcile process then calculates the license position based on the normalised inventory data and purchase data.

On our cloud, steps 3-6 happen behind the scenes on Flexera's side.

 

For non-FNMS sources, the beacon collects it and the "Upload 3rd party inventory data" scheduled task uploads the data to the batch server component which automatically triggers the relevant reader for that source (see step 4) which depending on settings may then automatically trigger the writers and then the reconciliation.

Is this more what you're looking for?

(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.

Hello @mrichardson , @ChrisG 

Pardon me dig this old thread as currently I am trying to solve an 'issue' for a client that the observation is that the standalone beacon 3rd party inventory package when it's uploaded to server. It triggers "reader+writer" which takes half day as we have 3 such data source from the beacon per day.

Based on Matt's input "scheduled task uploads the data to the batch server component which automatically triggers the relevant reader for that source (see step 4) which depending on settings may then automatically trigger the writers and then the reconciliation.  "

It looks like we have an option to control the system/batch server to only run Reader instead of full reconcile cycle.  Any chance you can confirm where/what are  the 'setting' need to configure ?

Thank you in advance.

Best Regards

Kev 

Spot on @alexander_frit   164 (PackageUploadTriggersWriters)  🙂

Thank you very much