IT Asset Management - how to assign a location to a device via a beacon

[bmaudlin]

Hi Guys 👋,

Any advice on the following scenario, would be great...

I am currently looking to re-engineer our IT Asset/FNMS configuration to remove a number of manual tasks we currently have to undertake on a regular basis.

Our Flexera inventory agents have had the ability to report into any beacon disabled, so they only report into a beacon as per our configuration.

Does IT Asset/FNMS currently have the ability to assign a location to a beacon, and any agents that report into that beacon will have the correct location appended to the device? So for example a Canadian device will route through the local Canada beacon and have Canada appended to the location. Conversely a UK device would route through to the local UK beacon and report as belonging to the UK. 

Would assigning subnets to an inventory beacon and a location to the beacon would that cater for this scenario? 

Any thoughts will be appreciated. 

Ben

[rmiller1]

Hi Ben,

Hope you are well. My thoughts on this are that there are two points here - (1) updating the Location of the Inventory device, based upon the subnet data from AD, and (2) making sure the Agent reports to the correct Beacon, again based upon subnet information.

For (1) I would say this is fairly easily accomplished in Configuration, with a tick box selected that will update the Location field in the device automatically, as the agent picks up the ip configuration of the device each day. It does require that you have integrated to AD and are importing (and also that the information in AD is in good shape!), but this is fairly straight-forward and will update your environment.

For (2) there have been a number of changes in the last years to the agent-to-beacon configuration that will allow agents to choose the optimal configuration. In *most* cases the local beacon will be the best for the agent (in terms of performance), but what if that beacon is down?

There is some good information here: https://docs.flexera.com/FlexNetManagerSuite2020R2/EN/GatherFNInv/index.html#SysRef/FlexNetInventoryAgent/topics/SelectIBs-Intro.html

There also the ability to prioritize the beacons, as detailed here: https://docs.flexera.com/FlexNetManagerSuite2020R2/EN/GatherFNInv/index.html#SysRef/FlexNetInventoryAgent/topics/NetSel-PrioritizeIBs.html

If you were looking to "hard" allocate the agents to specific beacons, and override the behavior above, I would suggest that this would probably be done at the agent level, and would need maintenance to ensure correct operation. Because of this, you may end up in a position where you are doing a lot of work on this, and not getting a great deal of benefit?
We (Flexera) suggest that you configure the agent to beacon relationship with the most redundancy and in the most automated fashion, and use (1) to report on device location (for chargeback, cross-charge, etc.)
Not sure if I'm understanding 100% what is driving your requirement, but hopefully the links above can help?

Of course, you can raise a ticket for direct support involvement too.

HTH

[stefange]

Hi,

Currently the beacons do not have this kind of feature so it will require some manual scripting and importing on your side. What you could do is rename all the incoming files on each beacon with a unique beacon prefix before uploading and use this prefix as import value on your processing server. The processing server than translates the prefix and assigns the correct location to the inventory device using scripts/adapter studio. You'll need something in place before your upload and import before it will work.

Stefan

[bmaudlin]

Hi @rmiller1 ,

Thanks for the detail, so in our environment we have the agents configured to report into one location in rather than to report into any child inventory server. 

Ben