Oracle Discovery

[dbeckner]

I have read through the System Reference document, Gathering Flexera Inventory, and Online help, but I want to clarify some question about Oracle discovery. 

I want to use the FlexNet beacon to discover all the Oracle DB server on the network. Besides needing firewall rules to allow traffic over the Oracle ports, are there any other requirements? Looking to know if there are any account permissions required on the servers or if the discovery tool will just scan the network and look for any active listeners on the specified ports.

[winvarma]

Hi Beckner,

Your understanding is correct and the discovery will be done based on the specified ports via network scan and no additional account permissions are needed.

Regards

[ChrisG · Accepted solution]

It is indeed common that no special permissions need to be set up to discover Oracle Databases through a network scan from a beacon. One exception to this is if your listeners are configured to require some sort of authentication to be performed before they will divulge details of what databases are running behind them. In that case you will need to have appropriate Oracle listener credentials stored in the beacon's password store to perform the discovery.

If you also want to use the beacon to gather Oracle Database inventory (once discovery has been performed), you will need to have credentials for appropriate Oracle Database users configured in the password store. See Appendix C: Oracle Tables and Views for Oracle Inventory Collectionfor details on rights that these users require.

[dbeckner]

@ChrisG I have a follow-up question. We have SCCM and Tanium Asset feeding FNMS at a customer site. I have Oracle DB servers with the SCCM and Tanium clients installed. When I check the inventory for these DB servers neither product is reporting the existence of any Oracle software. I know that even if those products did report the software we still need the in-depth inventory that the agent provides but we are looking at all methods of discovery for Oracle DB servers in our environment. In your experience does SCCM or Tanium report the existence of Oracle DB software or is it a complete blind spot in a network and require some form of advanced discovery method?

[ChrisG]

@dbeckner - SCCM would normally gather software details from the Add/Remove Programs area of the registry. So if the Oracle software installed on a computer registers itself there then you could expect to see that information in SCCM. What you would see in relation to that data in FlexNet Manager Suite will primarily depend on what (if any) rules have been configured in the Application Recognition Library to recognize it. SCCM may also be gathering details of executable files found on the filesystem which you could see, although (as a generalization) the Application Recognition Library won't use much of that kind of data for recognizing installations of Oracle software.

I'm not so familiar with Tanium and where it gathers data from, but would guess it is likely similar to SCCM.