Sub-net popuation from Business Adapter

[dsalter]

Our active directory team has stopped managing all subnets in AD so I no longer have them coming to FNMS to be assigned to a Beacon.

I am looking to create a business adapter to populate subnets from a DB or excel file.

Does anybody have any experience with this and could you share any tips on how you are populating the data? Possibly even share the business adapter with me?

Thanks
-Damon

[ChrisG]

The subnet data model is not directly exposed as an object that can be used in a business adapter, so you would need to look at writing custom SQL statements in the business adapter to populate the data. The table you need to populate is the SiteSubnet table; schema information for this table can be found in the FNMSSystemReference.pdf guide.

This approach will only be feasible if you are using FlexNet Manager Suite OnPrem; if you are using the Cloud product then there is no direct access to the database to be able to populate this data. (Although it is possible that the FlexNet Manager Suite Cloud web API might provide interfaces for manipulating subnet records--I'm not sure about that.)

Chris @ Flexera

[Sharcruik]

Hi Damon, were you able to successfully write a business adapter for your subnets - I have the same issue where many of our subnets are not in AD, and I have a huge number that would have to be added manually.
This is causing inventory not to be captured even if the agent is installed (at least that is what I think is happening).

[ChrisG]

Sharcruik wrote:
Hi Damon, were you able to successfully write a business adapter for your subnets - I have the same issue where many of our subnets are not in AD, and I have a huge number that would have to be added manually.
This is causing inventory not to be captured even if the agent is installed (at least that is what I think is happening).

Hi Sharcruik, In relation to the inventory capturing part of your message:

One setting to check would be to ensure the Migration mode: Restrict inventory settings to targeted devices setting on the Discovery & Inventory > Settings page is turned off: if that is turned on (which it may be if you have migrated from a very old version of FlexNet Manager Platform) this may cause agents to fail to download policy settings, which in turn may mean they don't gather inventory.

Apart from that, I doubt that subnet configuration would have anything to do with agents not capturing inventory.

Chris @ Flexera

[Sharcruik]

cgrinton wrote:
Hi Sharcruik, In relation to the inventory capturing part of your message:

One setting to check would be to ensure the Migration mode: Restrict inventory settings to targeted devices setting on the Discovery & Inventory > Settings page is turned off: if that is turned on (which it may be if you have migrated from a very old version of FlexNet Manager Platform) this may cause agents to fail to download policy settings, which in turn may mean they don't gather inventory.

Apart from that, I doubt that subnet configuration would have anything to do with agents not capturing inventory.

Chris @ Flexera

Thanks Chris - it is not selected so that is not the issue. The issue was the UNIX team installed the agent and mis-spelled the beacon name, so they need to re-install 😞
Our other problem has to do with VMware discovery rule which I do believe may be subnet related. Currently working with Flexera consultant on this.

[jasonlu]

dsalter wrote:
Our active directory team has stopped managing all subnets in AD so I no longer have them coming to FNMS to be assigned to a Beacon.

I am looking to create a business adapter to populate subnets from a DB or excel file.

Does anybody have any experience with this and could you share any tips on how you are populating the data? Possibly even share the business adapter with me?

Thanks
-Damon

Damon, hi.
I've been recently working on an adapter to build out rules, actions, targets, and subnets.

I've just finished the population of sites and subnets, and the assigning to beacons.
So it can be done, but the adapter uses all custom queries so it only works will FNMS on Premise installations.

For the sites/subnets part, there are sets of stored procedures in the FNMSCompliance database that are useful.
I've used:

SiteAdd
Create a site with a given name

SiteSubnetRemoveAllBySiteID
delete all subnets under a given Site

SiteSubnetBindBatch
add subnets all at once from a temp table. You need to build out the #SiteSubnet table (check the stored procedure code of the table definition)

BeaconSiteSubnetMappingAddBatch
this is the mapping between the Beacon and the subnet. Again build out a temp table first.



I can create the targets, create devices under the targets (IP Addresses), sites, subnets, bind beacons to subnets, and create and configure Actions.
The only thing I can't do currently is create the XML for creating a rule schedule.



Jason

[ChrisG]

jasonlu wrote:
[...]
For the sites/subnets part, there are sets of stored procedures in the FNMSCompliance database that are useful.
I've used:
[...]

One slight word of caution in using stored procedures like these: database stored procedures are generally considered internal interfaces of the system. As such, they are not documented and there is no guarantee the interfaces will not change from one release of FlexNet Manager Suite to the next. It will be up to you to detect changes if and when changes are made as Flexera doesn't publish information about internal interface changes.

With that said, I suspect there have not been any changes over the last few years related to the specific stored procedures that @jasonlu has noted, so the probability of change in any particular release is quite low.

Chris @ Flexera