Flexera will be releasing Discovery and Inventory Capabilities for Containers

[Hmckay]

Flexera continues to innovate to help customers solve critical challenges. Our latest release will include visibility for software running in containers.

Customers have told us:

• Moving micro-services architecture is leading to an increase use of containers
• Gaining visibility into and understanding the software running in containers will be a game changer
• They will use licensed software (Oracle, MySQL, etc.) on containers if they can track the licenses

Flexera is now positioned to help customers solve these common business problems.

What do our agent-based discovery capabilities include:

• Image and container discovery
• Event based individual container scan

How does it work:

• Agent resides on the host machine
• Report grid with drilldown capabilities
• Drill down by host->Image->Container->Software Installed
• You can view the list of containers that software is installed on
• Identify “Container” type

How to enable it:

This feature is coming soon for FNMS cloud customers (target is late April/May. On-Premises customers will be able to leverage this feature in May/June 2020.

If you DO NOT WISH to have this feature enabled, open a support case, and we will make sure this feature is not enabled on your account. 

Listen to a recording of our recent Containers webinar to learn more about this new feature and how these capabilities will help you transform your business. Discovery and inventory capabilities are the beginning of this journey as more capabilities to help organizations manage containers will be coming in future releases. 

[marius]

Hi, are you going to include this feature in 2020 R1 for On-Premise FNMS?

[bmaudlin]

@Hmckay 

Could you please confirm which Container technologies will be supported on this release?

[chandan_kodgirwa]

We are using FNMS2019R2 and need more clarity on this topic for below points as container based scanning is not available.
1. Does current FNMS agent will collect all software installed under container as software installed on host or not?

2. Do we see all IP address of containers in general tab of host under IP Address block?

[Hmckay]

Additional information about the technologies included and when these features will be available can be found in the webinar recording here . 

[bmaudlin]

@Hmckay 

Thanks for that, with Phases 3 and 4, will these require a further agent upgrade to enable the additional container features? 

[dmathias]

Could you please post somewhere other than YouTube, which is blocked by our IT's policy - maybe within Learning Center?

Thanks, David Mathias

[pratulpatel]

Hello @bmaudlin,

Depending on your needs, yes you may need another agent upgrade. For example we will bring out support for windows containers in future releases and if you need support for windows  containers, you will need to update them. Hope that answers your question.

Thanks,
Pratul.

[pratulpatel]

Hello @dmathias,

Yes we will find out the possibility to upload it to our learning center as well.

Thank you,
Pratul.

[bmaudlin]

Hello @pratulpatel,

Okay good to know, as well as Kubernetes in Phase 3, will there also be support for other technologies such as Docker?

[pratulpatel]

Hello @bmaudlin,

Docker containers will be supported with this initial release (2020 R1 or the upcoming cloud release) using  Flexera agents. 

Thank you,
Pratul.

[bmaudlin]

Hi @pratulpatel ,

Good to know, when is the expected release to support Kubernetes?

[Ronny_OO7]

Hi, Can you please write what is exactly supported in the first release?

[mrichardson]

Hi @bmaudlin 

Docker hosts running in Kubernetes will work if the agent is installed on each machine hosting the Docker service; if you're referring to connecting to the Kubernetes APIs to get infrastructure details, this will be coming in a later phase however we haven't scheduled it yet as we are planning to get feedback on the current functionality first and are also researching how vendors are licensing containers so that we can identify what changes we need to implement.

[mrichardson]

@Ronny_OO7 

In summary we have added the following:

• A new setting in Discovery and Inventory settings allows you to determine whether container inventory is enabled or disabled
• FNMS inventory agent has been updated with the capability to inventory Linux devices to collect list of Docker container images and hosts
• A report showing All Containers (Hosts, Images and Containers) in the environment with links to open the image properties
• In the Devices tab of Application properties you can now see which instances of the application is running on a container using a sub-tab to differentiate applications installed on the host itself vs those in containers.
• A new "Containers" tab has been added to Inventory Device properties for the host devices listing all containers with links to the image properties.
• Image properties will show all Applications installed on each container deployed from that image across any host.
• Application views such as All Applications has been updated so that the Installed count includes the installations in containers
• A new optional column called "Containers" has been added to show what sub-set of the Installed count is from containers.

[mrichardson]

@Ronny_OO7 

Please note my post above is the full list of what will be included in FNMS 2020 R1.

Cloud customers will get some of that functionality in the release prior to 2020 R1 however it will be disabled by default so anyone on FNMS Cloud who wants to try out an early version, please let me know.

[adamgalbreath]

@mrichardson ,   I have (2) questions that I'm hoping you can help me with regarding containers:

1.  We have the FlexNet Agent v15.2 installed on all devices within Azure and inventory is being collected successfully.   To collect container inventory do we need to do anything else besides this:

• Enable the setting globally using the Enable detection of Docker and running inventory agent inside Docker containers in the Container Scanning section on the Inventory Settings page

2.  When is Flexera planning to release a version of the FlexNet Agent that supports container inventory on Windows Servers operating systems?   If I read the documentation correctly container inventory is only supported on Linux 64bit.  

[mag00_75]

Hi @adamgalbreath 

the agent only supports inventory of docker technology and no other. Its also required to have the agent installed in the host running docker engine.

from version 2020r2 its also supports windows as host operating system, but recommend minimum 2020r2.1 due to a bug that has been fixed

[adamgalbreath]

@mag00_75 ,  I've been searching the documentation and can't find where it shows that containers are now supported on Windows OS.    Can you point me to where this is documented?

Thanks - Adam

[mag00_75]

@adamgalbreath 

https://docs.flexera.com/FlexNetManagerSuite2020R2/EN/Features/index.html#FeatureList/2020R2/2020_r2.html