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We’ve all been there at some point or another when working within FNMS, on a beacon, and for some reason, the beacon just doesn’t seem to be working.

You spend time looking through all of the logs, eventually contacting Technical Support, only to find out it’s something in Windows that's not configured correctly.

Wouldn’t it be helpful to able to quickly check your connections and services, identify potential issues and spot when your files are not uploading?

That day is now here, as we are happy to introduce the new Flexnet Beacon Monitor:

 

BeaconDashboard2.PNG

This tool has been introduced to help provide visibility into possible issues in your Windows environment, we are doing a phased approach i.e. we have included the 3 most requested things to check however if there is enough demand, we can add more.

Each of these cards can be drilled into and configured:

Monitored Services

This card allows you to configure what Windows services to track e.g. Beacon Engine service and IIS service

 

Monitored Directories

This tracks the Incoming directories and warns you if the number of files is above a threshold you’ve set in the config file.

 

Parent Connectivity

Ever struggle with connections only to find you need TLS 1.2 enabled and you only have TLS 1.0?  This page helps you to spot potential connection issues and the slideout window (click on one of the statuses) will help give you the insights you need:

BeaconConnectivity.jpg

In the example above, TLS is configured on the parent but not on this beacon which would be an issue over HTTPS however as it’s using HTTP it’s fine; this allows you to get an insight into whether the connection will likely work before switching to HTTPS!

 

As this is a phased release, not all cards and features (e.g. the Settings page) have been finished and you will need to make changes in the config file (see the included help document) however we didn’t want to wait to deliver this to you.

 

You can find the "Flexnet Beacon Monitor.zip" in the “Download Product and Licenses” section of the Flexnet Manager community page, it’s under Flexnet Manager Platform and has been added to each version because this is independent of the beacon code and so will work with any version of FNMS Inventory beacon!

 

Further improvements to the beacon monitor will be based on feedback from you, our community users so really looking forward to hearing what you all think.

(22) Comments
christopher_3
By
Level 3

On what device should the Flexnet Beacon Monitor be installed on?  Each beacon?

mrichardson
By
Flexera Alumni

@christopher_3  you are correct, the beacon monitor needs installing on each beacon.

Tooling42
By
Level 7

Hi Matt,

so, I can install it also on a master beacon?

Because BeaconMonitor.pdf  shows:
Note:This server could be a parent beacon, or a FlexNet Manager Suite application server.

Best regards

iammanzi
By
Level 7

Hi @mrichardson 

I have been using the Beacon Monitor for a few days now and i have a few suggestions:

  1. Is there a possibility to show the Task Scheduler to see if any of those tasks have failed
  2. Can we have the the beacon engine log file monitored so that if there is an issue it will show

Might be a bit far fetched but, nice to ask 🙂

regards

Manish

mrichardson
By
Flexera Alumni

@Tooling42 you can install this on any beacon, no matter what version of how it’s installed as this is completely independent of the beacon code so has 0 dependencies on the beacon architecture.

 

@iammanzi this sort of feedback is very valuable, when I started planning this I ended up with a list of around 10-15 different possible cards and after speaking to several customers, services consultants and support engineers we added the 3 most popular however this doesn’t have to be the end of it!

 

The plan is to see how much interest there is in developing this further and then I’ll put it to a vote here on the community to choose the next items, so all who would like to see more added, please comment on this thread to let me know what sort of things you’d like to see.

Tooling42
By
Level 7

@mrichardson 
That's sound like a wish list.
Perhaps it's possible, that the beacon monitor can check:
- If the Active Directory import was done with a working LDAP connection.
- If there is a configured inventory systems connection,
  e.g. like: SCCM, Microsoft 365
- if there are child beacon servers, check the connectivity and
  the beacon service is running.
That are points, which I check often.

Thank you and best regards

sasikumar_r
By
Level 7

Can we use these on Multi Tenant environment? Like monitoring the beacons across different tenants by installing it on application server?

mrichardson
By
Flexera Alumni

Hi @Tooling42 

You are correct, if there's enough demand for further improvements then I will create a wish list and I'll include those.

One clarification, on the inventory systems connection, am I right in thinking you want to see if the last run of those succeeded or not?

 

@sasikumar_r  at the moment the beacon monitor only works locally so you can use it in a MT environment but you need to install / check it on each beacon.

As per my above comment to Tooling42, if there's enough demand then we will add more functionality and that includes inter-connectivity between them as being able to monitor at the parent level is something that would be very useful I agree

marcos_lara
By
Level 3

Where can I download this new beacon monitor tool and installation/config instructions?

Thanks!

Tooling42
By
Level 7

@marcos_lara 
Hi,
You can find the "Flexnet Beacon Monitor.zip" in the “Download Product and Licenses” section of the Flexnet Manager community page,
it’s under Flexnet Manager Platform.

In the ZIP file you will find:
BeaconMonitor.pdf
FlexNet.Beacon.Monitor.msi

winvarma
By
Level 10

Hi Forum,

i can't find the link as suggested and able to see only below from downloads. Please guide

 

winvarma_0-1585911517996.png

Regards

 

winvarma
By
Level 10

Hi Forum,

Request some help in getting the Beacon monitoring tool downloaded as i'm in a great need of this to figure out some issue at the Beacon end.

Regards 

kenneyremmerswaal
By
Level 2

Hi all,

We - from Softline Solutions - have built our own monitoring solution called "Support Manager for FlexNet Manager" to support our customers. This solution does monitor the whole infrastructure of FNMS (including Beacon servers, the application server and the database server).

Things like services, scheduled tasks and database disk space will be monitored by this tool.  Besides monitoring (and automatically creating tickets via e-mail) this web tool also makes it very easy to download log files and other information.

Some impressions below:

kenneyremmerswaal_0-1586263215780.png

 

kenneyremmerswaal_1-1586263227175.png

kenneyremmerswaal_2-1586263317978.pngkenneyremmerswaal_3-1586263338346.pngkenneyremmerswaal_4-1586263349986.pngkenneyremmerswaal_5-1586263363734.pngkenneyremmerswaal_6-1586263375427.png

This also works for a multi-server implementation.

Please contact us if you would like to have more information: info.nl@softline-group.com

Kind regards,

Kenney

mrichardson
By
Flexera Alumni

@winvarma,

If you go to the Flexnet Manager Platform option and under the latest version (2019 R2) you should see Flexnet Beacon Monitor in there.

If you still can't find it, please let me know.

winvarma
By
Level 10

Hi @mrichardson ,

Unable to find the zip file you mentioned and able to see only the below.

winvarma_0-1586266384841.png

 

Regards

kclausen
By
Flexera Alumni

@winvarma  - Click on the "FlexNet Manager Suite 2019 R2" link.  You will now see several files that can be downloaded, including "FlexNet Beacon Monitor.zip"

winvarma
By
Level 10

Hi @kclausen ,

Thanks for the Guidance and able to find the setup file. 

heiko_fuchs2
By
Level 4

Hi, I would test the new Beacon Monitoring tool on one of the beacons and installed it but it shows nothing on the browser (firefox 68).

I found a message in beaconmonitoring.log 

"2020-05-26T07:48:39+02:00","level":"error","msg":"Error while reading from Writer: bufio.Scanner: token too long"}

What do it mean ? 

Beacon runs on Windows Srv 2016 with IIS 10.0 and Beacon 14.0 in https communication only.

THX for your support

 

 

joshua_neadow
By
Level 5

Good Afternoon,

This is a great feature and one im looking forward to having, but can i make a couple recommendations?

  • This feature needs to be located in the WebUI for FNMS.  Having to log in to each server to check this is time consuming.  Having the information already included in the WebUI would allow for faster troubleshooting and make the tool easier to use.  We can have a failsafe should the site be down to run is separately.
  • Can we get a similar feature for Agent Management on the individual Devices?  currently, the only way we know its possibly not working is that we aren't getting an inventory.  having all of this information for that device so we know where we need to troubleshoot would be very beneficial.  we have almost 30k devices across 7 beacons.  For any devices that haven't had a connection in 3 days, we have to run powershell script to look up all the data the beacon monitor is pulling already.
joshua_neadow
By
Level 5

Task Scheduler Jobs are definately a must for tracking.  We have monitoring in place, but it would be nice if this monitored those as well.  Sometimes internal monitoring doesnt catch everything or the triggers fail.

dbeckner
By Level 10 Champion
Level 10 Champion

Is there a timeline for any new changes coming to the beacon monitoring tool? Monitoring the scheduled tasks and having this interface/module accessible in the dashboard would be highly valuable. Most secure environments disable browser access at the server level for admin accounts.

 

It might be mundane but some of the simpler but overlooked settings like anonymous auth for the sites (managesoftdl, etc) or allowing specific extensions in request filtering would be nice. Similar to how the TLS settings are checked. 

mrichardson
By
Flexera Alumni

Apologies for the delay in responding.  Currently there are no further changes planned however this is based on what is submitted through the Ideas portal.

We do welcome any suggestions in this area and if an Idea is submitted and shows a good level of demand then we will look at making further changes to the beacon monitoring tool.