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Separate inventory gathering and upload server for group of inventory devices

Dear All,

I have the following requirement from a customer regarding the inventory gathering process .

  1. There is should be a possibility to create multiple schedules (Inventory gathering + upload) that will be applied to two or more group of inventory devices

    eg : One group of servers will gather and upload the inventory at midnight where other set will do the same at day time .
  2. if an inventory gathering and upload process is missed during actual schedule due to system hibernation or offline scenarios  etc, the gathering and upload process should happen once device is active or online .

FYI : we are using FlexNet inventory agent in devices 

 

Regards,

Junaid Vengadan

(6) Replies

Hi @emtmeta ,

As I know you don't have the option to create 2 separate inventory schedule, it's only one when you say from which our to start the inventory , for example you say inventory is on daily basis starting from 12:00 and the time window is 6 hours, so in this time window the agent will start randomly the upload process, it's frustrating that you have only one scheduler, I know, the same is for me also.

Regarding targets, you have the option to create targets to assign the group to one beacon or to other beacon, to create target when you you update your system, based on OS, or ip, or subnet.

Regarding missed update, yes, there is an option to run the as soon as possible when the agent is available or to wait for the next upload window.

ChrisG
By Community Manager Community Manager
Community Manager
To handle a requirement for multiple schedules like described here, you would likely have to look for some other technology in use in your customer's organization to do the scheduling and invoke the ndtrack inventory gathering process at suitable times. Capabilities built in to FlexNet Manager Suite don't directly support different schedule settings for different groups of devices.

In this case as you wouldn't be using the FlexNet agent scheduling capability to initiate the inventory gathering process, you would also need to have whatever scheduling technology you use run "missed" inventory gathering operations after hibernation etc.
(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.)

And if you will use only the core of the agent (ndtrack), you will not have any policy automatically downloaded, also in case of future update of the agent, you will need to plant and use your deployment tool, also you need to take into consideration if you use oracle inventory with agent capability in case of future update of the oracle capability that is provided via policy you will need to deploy that update on servers.

Thanks a lot for your feedback .

i need your feedback on the below requirement , in gathering inventory , logs, evidences etc from inventory devices with in a fixed time period as follows 

Create  tasks and schedule them as follows  .

task 1 : Start both flexera services 

Wait for 30 minutes 

task 2 : Run all Missed task which may not triggered by task 1 (like inventory gathering, policy updates , upload ) 

Wait for 60 minutes 

Task 3 : Stop two flexera services 

My doubt is what all process will run in task1 and this task will be enough to trigger all inventory agent process ?
if not, which all process we need to include in task 2

Most importantly , this practice is advisable ? 

 

Regards,

Junaid 

 

Hi @emtmeta ,

I found your approach very complicated and holds a lot of variable.

For example, you have 4 tasks in the Flexera:

  • Generate inventory
  • Update machine policy
  • Update client settings
  • Upload client files

The only tasks that you can control from WebUI is Generate inventory

So if you have for example the time window for Inventory generation between 00:00 - 06:00, the server will in this random time frame generate the inventory, after he will wait for Upload Client Files, task to upload, this can vary from server to server, from a few minutes to a few hours.

Going back to your proposal, for example you start the services at 14:00 and keep it up to 15:00, it's out side of Generate inventory task, may be in this time window you will trigger the Update machine policy, but I think inventory will be not generated, unless you manually trigger the task generate inventory and trigger to upload client files.

I found this approach very tricky and unreliable, I would use the core of the inventory and generate and force to upload to a beacon server, downsize if that you don't have a fail over list of beacons, no policy update, no automatic agent update. 

This is my opinion, may be other experts have other solutions.

 

Hi Juanid,

Simply stopping and starting the two Windows Services related to the Flexera agent is not recommended. There is a number of reasons:

  1. The scheduling of the Flexera agent is controlled by the global policy setting configured from the FNMS Web UI. If the Flexera services are not running on a device during the randomly picked time within the time window configured in the FNMS policy, the Flexera agent will not run at all.
  2. Usage data for applications launched interactively as well as IBM PVU peak consumption data will be tracked only while the Flexera Windows services are running.

If you want to trigger the Flexera agent manually, the best practice for Windows is using the "Task Scheduler" for running the 'ndtrack.exe' with command line parameters as documented in the "Gathering FlexNet Inventory" document.

Additional limitations of running the Flexera agent (ndtrack) manually are:

  • The agent scheduling and agent configuration needs to done manually on each device and
  • You have to hard code a single beacon for uploading the Inventory data.