Aug 09, 2019
06:10 AM
App Portal does not allow you to choose a specific deployment type for an application. The deployment type is determined by SCCM based on the priority order and applicability rules configured within the application model. If you need App Portal to use a specific deployment type, you would need to make a separate application in SCCM for that deployment type and configure App Portal to use that application.
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Aug 09, 2019
06:07 AM
2 Kudos
To add to Chris' response, we wouldn't expect any need to increase hardware resources in SCCM just to accommodate App Portal. Certainly, if the SCCM infrastructure is aging and struggling to keep up already, it may be time to upgrade servers, but generally, if the hardware is relatively current and sized suitably based on Microsoft guidance (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sccm/core/plan-design/configs/recommended-hardware), you should be fine.
A few things to note:
The user/computer/relationship data sync process that runs on a nightly basis can take a long time if not configured properly. The primary setting involved here is the "Page Size" setting under Site Management > Settings > Deployment > Common. This page size defaults to a very small number (100, I believe). For large environments, that will cause the sync process to take a really long time. I generally set this to somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000. You can look at the Datasync.log to see when your sync process starts and ends, then make adjustments to the page size and see what impact that has on the sync time. Generally, larger values will cause the sync to complete more quickly (though there will eventually be a point of diminishing returns and potentially a tipping point where things go more slowly). Just experiment and see what works best for your environment. One thing to note is that if an error occurs during syncing of a particular record, all other records after that within a "page" will be discarded for that sync cycle, so there is a trade-off between performance and discovering new objects. You should always keep an eye on the sync logs to make sure you aren't running into errors that prevent you from having full visibility to all of the users/computers in your environment.
The data sync cycle is scheduled to run at 02:00 local time on the server. If you have backup jobs or other routine maintenance scheduled on your SCCM database at that time, you should change the start time so it doesn't conflict with those other activities.
In addition to managing collection memberships in SCCM, App Portal also queries the SCCM database on a regular basis looking for status of deployments. Depending on the volume of requests and how long those take to complete, you could end up with a lot of "status" data being pulled on a frequent basis. If you feel that your SCCM site is being bogged down by App Portal, you may consider adjusting the Frequency to update last status state timer under Site Management > Settings > Timers to check for status less frequently. Of course the trade-off is that requests that complete very quickly will take a little longer to report completion in App Portal.
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Aug 08, 2019
07:16 PM
1 Kudo
Look at WD_VPackageProperty. All visibility conditions will be stored in that table, but collections will be stored by collection ID rather than by name.
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Aug 08, 2019
10:09 AM
2 Kudos
Take a look at the SLA Dashboard in the App Broker admin UI.
Documentation reference here: https://helpnet.flexerasoftware.com/appportal2019r1/default.htm#helplibrary/SLA_Dashboard.htm
Set the start and end dates as desired and click Apply. Then click on the Failed Deployments "card". This will produce a report showing all of the failed deployments during the designated time frame, and you should be able to export that to Excel/PDF.
I guess I should amend this slightly. There might be other reasons requests in ServiceNow could get marked as Closed Incomplete without ever being sent to App Broker, but I'm not sure. For example, if the workflow validation steps fail or if the request is rejected by an approver, that may also end up as Closed Incomplete within ServiceNow (although maybe they get a different status). In any case, the report in App Broker will only show requests that actually got submitted to App Broker from ServiceNow (i.e. workflow passed all prior steps and reached the Submit Order step), so if you need a full list of Closed Incomplete requests, you would need to run that report in ServiceNow.
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Jul 22, 2019
11:24 AM
And to clarify, version 12.5 represents 2017 R2. The .1 following 12.5 represents Service Pack 1.
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Jul 09, 2019
12:46 PM
1 Kudo
For anyone interested in the outcome of this, it turned out to be a custom action that had been added to the On Submit event that was sending the wrong value to ServiceNow.
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Jul 07, 2019
01:30 PM
We would need to see logs from both App Broker and ServiceNow to understand what's going on. Please open a support case and attach workflow results and logs from ServiceNow, as well as server logs and request logs from App Broker. Can you confirm that the request is actually getting to App Broker (i.e. do you see the request in My Requests in App Broker)? Is the message that the user is receiving an email message or something else? If email, is it coming from ServiceNow or App Broker? Could it be that the ServiceNow request workflow is exiting due to a validation error and sending a "closed incomplete" email notification?
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Jul 02, 2019
01:31 PM
Also, just to be sure, the variable name in this case is ##RECORD_ID##, not ##Record_ID##. Variable names are case-sensitive.
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Jul 02, 2019
01:28 PM
Leaving that last timer with no value will not cause it to monitor indefinitely. It has a default value when no value is supplied. I don't recall for sure, but I think it might be something like 2 hours. Charles, can you confirm what the default value is for the "false flags" timer when no value is specified?
Regarding the "incorrect status", your best bet is when you encounter such an issue, you can open a case with our Support team and provide the App Portal logs, the App Portal Web Service logs (from the SCCM server), and the SCCM logs (both server and client). Support can then help track down what's happening and determine if timers need to be adjusted or if there is some other issue. In the example you gave here, it could be that the deployment was initially successful and then later retried the installation (because it was still in the collection or perhaps re-added to the collection) and failed because it was already installed. In this case, the most recent status from SCCM would indicate a failure, so App Portal would reflect that failure. If that's what happened, it could be something that could be addressed by tweaking some of the timers, but we wouldn't know without further investigation.
BTW, what the technicians are likely talking about is that in-console SCCM dashboards and reporting will not show what happened with the deployment once the device is removed from the collection because the reports query status messages for current targets of the deployment based on the associated collection membership; however, the activity related to that client should all be in the logs. You can start with the App Portal server logs. They will tell you if we attempted to add the device to the collection or not. Then you can look at the App Portal web service logs on the SCCM server. They will tell you if the device was actually successfully added to the collection or not. If it was, then the SCCM server logs should show activity related to that device and that deployment. Assuming the policy was created for that client, you can then look at the SCCM client logs on that device to see what happened with the deployment. If there is no activity related to that deployment policy, then the client never retrieved the policy. If there is activity related to that deployment, then you'll see whether it was successful or if it failed and why. None of this requires the device to remain in the collection.
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Jul 01, 2019
10:25 AM
In addition to not getting install status back, you also wouldn't be able to use general catalog items for license reclamation. I don't recommend that approach.
What is the reason you're trying to reduce the number of collections? There really shouldn't be a performance impact. App Portal creates direct membership collections with no evaluation schedule and no incremental evaluation, so having a lot of collections will not keep collection evaluator busy. Also, all of App Portal's collections are isolated to their own folder, so they shouldn't get in the way or be confused with other collections.
Can you tell me why you need your other collections and AD groups? It seems like a lot of unnecessary overhead to have to manually create/maintain collections and AD groups. Why not just use the App Portal collections and eliminate your other collections?
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Jun 28, 2019
01:17 PM
Please note that the connection to the FNMS database only works with the App Portal service account credentials. The alternate credentials that you can specify in the settings are only used to connect to the FNMS web service, which doesn't come into play here. I've asked engineering in the past why we don't use those credentials when connecting to SQL as well and have been told that we can't use impersonation on the SQL connection. I'm still not sure that's true, but haven't made any headway on it yet. In any case, the only way this will work for you in the current state of the product is if you give the App Portal service account read permissions to the FNMS compliance database.
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Jun 27, 2019
11:04 AM
If I recall correctly, the View link for targeted devices will only work if you have configured FNMS database connectivity under the Flexera Integration site settings. Have you configured the Database Server and Database Name under FlexNet Manager Suite Database Connection Settings? Does your App Portal service account have read permissions to that database?
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Jun 26, 2019
01:27 PM
1 Kudo
Please note that there is a Custom User ID Sync SQL Query and a Custom User Sync SQL Query. The examples from Charles put the WHERE clause on the Custom User Sync SQL Query; however, I always recommend putting any filter clauses on the Custom User ID Sync SQL Query. The way the sync process works is that it first runs the user ID query to get a list of all user resource ID's that match the criteria. Then we break that list up into pages based on the page size you've defined in your settings and we run the user query to get the user details for those resource ID's, one page at a time. If you put the filter on the user ID query, it will bring back a smaller set of resource ID's, which will result in fewer pages, which will result in shorter sync times.
Here are a couple examples that I have used with customers to overcome various issues (in both cases, the Standard User Sync SQL Query can remain unchanged):
Collection-Based User Limiting
App Portal's licensing model has been changed (as of 2015) to user-based licensing instead of device-based licensing. However, the limiting view/collection in the site settings was never changed to match, so in order to remain in compliance with your user-based license count, it is best to create an SCCM user collection containing only the user accounts that are licensed to use App Portal. Then you can use a custom query to pull in only those users and ignore accounts like service accounts, test accounts, and admin accounts.
SELECT ResourceID AS UserResourceID
FROM v_CM_RES_COLL_CM10029D
ORDER BY SMSID
…where CM10029D is the collection ID of the desired user collection to use for limiting. This will limit the list of resource ID's to only those users that are in the selected user collection.
Skip Duplicate User Records in SCCM
Under rare circumstances, I have seen customers where SCCM has more than one user record with the same user name but different resource ID's. This is typically more common with computer records, where reimaging a machine with the same machine name can result in a new resource ID (and a similar custom query can be used for the Custom Computer ID Sync SQL Query). In both cases, you'll see unique key constraint violation errors in the data sync error log. To avoid this and only pull in non-duplicate user records from SCCM...
SELECT vru.ResourceID as UserResourceID
FROM v_R_User vru
WHERE (SELECT COUNT(ResourceID) FROM v_R_User WHERE User_Name0 = vru.User_Name0) = 1
ORDER BY vru.Name0
Note 1: Users with duplicate records will not be synced into App Portal. This will prevent them from using App Portal. If you run into a user that is not able to use App Portal and you don't see their account in App Portal, but they do show up in SCCM, make sure there are not duplicate records in SCCM for that user. If so, you'll need to remove all of the duplicate records and keep only the one you want (usually the one with the highest ResourceID). Note 2: If you don't use the custom query and you have duplicate records in SCCM, you will fail to sync more users into App Portal than just the duplicate users. The way the sync process works, if it hits an error on a particular user, it will skip all of the other resource ID's in that page of ID's and continue with the next page. If your page size is large, you may miss a lot of users. Note 3: Even if you do use this custom query, you may still hit unique key constraint violations. This could happen if you complete a sync cycle and pull in a user record with a particular ResourceID. Then at a later date, the same user has a new ResourceID (but only has one record for that user, i.e. not a duplicate). In such situations, you would need to delete that user from the WD_User table in the App Portal database and run a fresh sync (or you could just modify the record to have the new ResourceID, which might actually be safer).
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Jun 26, 2019
12:26 PM
Also note that when doing a request on behalf of someone else, you will have the option to choose whether to use the target user's approval process or your own approval process during the checkout. Make sure you select the correct one (I believe it should default to the target user, which I think aligns to what you're looking for).
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Jun 26, 2019
12:13 PM
On the "audit trail" topic, you should be able to see a lot of what is going on by looking at the App Portal request log for the request, the App Portal Web Service logs on the SCCM server, and the SCCM client logs on the device. It would be rare that you couldn't diagnose the failure reason using a combination of those logs.
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