Query Regarding Beacon

[Ansh140900]

I had a little doubt regarding Flexera.

I wanted to know that is it possible for a Beacon to send inventory data to two FNMS application servers, for instance same beacon sends data to an on-premises FNMS and to a Flexera One app server. Is this scenario possible?

[durgeshsingh]

That is not possible however you can enable replication setting in beacon & with some kind of script , can create a batch job to copy data into onprem application server.

[dbeckner]

A beacon can only be registered with one instance of FlexNet Manager or Flexera One. While it may be possible to script a task like @durgeshsingh mentioned it would likely be difficult to achieve. The inventory that the beacon generates is hashed in such a way that the batch server will discard it if it does not come from a registered beacon in that instance.

What is your use case and what are you trying to achieve by only having one beacon? What is hindering you from deploying a second beacon hooked into the same sources?

- Dan

[durgeshsingh]

Correctly said. Best & recommended option is to create one new beacon & then you can move data from replication to it from your current running beacon.

@Ansh140900 I can understand that you don't want to make any changes at agent level.

[mfranz]

Hi,

I believe, all data transfer the Beacon does, to a Beacon or App server above it in the hierarchy, should be file based (see "Incoming" folder and subfolders).

So my idea would be to change the existing tasks (see Task Scheduler) to copy these files to a local Beacon or App Server before they're uploaded to Flexera One.

Having done something like this in the past to route data to two on-prem environments (Test & Prod), there's a little risk of files arriving just after the copy process and before the upload. A little more complex scipt should be able to address this issue.

Best regards,

Markward

[mfranz]

One more thing: a colleague reminded me that the Beacon now has the replication function integrated. It should be even easier to send the data from the replication folder to the local FNMS app server.

[dbeckner]

After thinking this through some more -- it takes some engineering to do this but it is possible to register a beacon with one instance and then register it with a second instance. In this case you would see the same beacon GUID in both FNMS systems but it would only get its policy from the instance its connected to. (In this case probably Flexera One). As long as the beacon's GUID is registered in the On-Prem instance and you have replication turned on you could definitely bring the inventory into the On-Prem instance. This also means in the On-Prem instance that beacon would always show as having issue like Not Connected and no policy update because its never going to check in with the it again.

[darren_haehnel]

I've been using a script to copy NDI files to multiple environments for the past year+ and have never had to worry about any beacon info.

[mfranz]

I guess this would be the case if you wanted the Beacon to transfer the data the "normal" way and/or if you wanted the Beacon to be part of the environment.

But I just thought about moving* the replicated files to the "Incoming" folder of your on-prem Beacon/app server.

* e.g. using PowerShell

[dbeckner]

Guess I'm learning something new. I've always been under the impression that the batch server would not accept any inventory from a beacon not registered with it. Thanks for the info.