About bferring

bferring · ‎Jul 15, 2021

I have been implementing the FlexNet Manager for SAP solution for the past 7 years for Flexera Professional Services and can offer the best practice that we use when setting beacons up. It used to be that we would recommend but not require customers to have their own beacon for SAP connections prior to FNMS 2016 R1 since the beacon due to the load of performing RFC calls to multiple SAP systems. The SAP solution changed at version 2016 R1 introducing the Admin Module that would do the "heavy lifting" of inventory collection and store the inventory in a staging database on an SAP system to be later collected by the beacon. As such, we now do not bother separating SAP inventory to a separate beacon and will use an existing beacon to connect to the SAP Admin Module (has the same overhead of reading SCCM inventory for example). The main "trick" to using the SAP inventory on a shared beacon is to make sure you use IIS for the beacon and manually enabling Basic Authentication for the SAPService site in the following order: Install/enable IIS using the following guide for the Roles: https://docs.flexera.com/fnms/EN/WebHelp/index.html#topics/PrerequisitesForInvBeacons.html Launch the Beacon UI and switch the "Local web server" to "IIS web server" (use HTTPS if needed but DO NOT choose Use Basic Authentication) and Save (clicking OK to configure IIS) Launch IIS Manager and navigate to Sites --> Default Web Site --> SAP Service, double-click on Authentication, right-click on Basic Authentication and choose Enabled Either open a Command Prompt as Administrator and run an "iisreset" or restart the IIS web server in IIS Manager After this, you must also make sure to ALWAYS hit Cancel when it prompts for "The beacon will configure IIS" to not override the Basic Authentication you set manually within IIS Manager. Also, you do not want to use a beacon that is collocated with an on-premises FNMS application server since the the "SAP systems" is hidden when the beacon is installed on an application server. As a side note, Flexera Professional Services no longer attempts to deploy a beacon at all on an application servers as a best practice.

bferring · ‎May 18, 2020

I would suggest trying the following... Make sure to configure your analytics server under Admin --> System Configuration --> Reporting Make sure you configure your Admin user with to Web Administrator under Reporting --> Report Designer --> Assign Cognos Roles and assign other users to Analytics User Log out and log back in to test. If those don't work, I would suggest you submit a Case to our technical support team since something else might have gone wrong with your installation.

bferring · ‎Apr 06, 2020

This solution doesn't seem to work. Getting the following error like the license has changed... Failed to open inventory for oradbserver.company.com: 0xe1a50015. License term PurlBladeOracle was not found in file D:\ORAtrack\oratrack.xml Oracle inventory failed for server oradbserver.company.com.

bferring · ‎Mar 09, 2020

Answer 1: As far as database server running on the same server, it would depend on the sizing of that server. Officially, the release notes state "It is recommended that you have a dedicated database server for each FlexNet Manager for Engineering Applications server (one database server for Admin and one database server for Reporting)"; however, in general, this is usually only true if you have over 100 agents connecting to FNMEA. Practically speaking, I've not seen any performance issues with one database server hosting both Admin and Reporting databases for small to medium implementations. If you're on a large centralized Microsoft SQL server hosting say a dozen databases, you should simply ensure that you have enough available RAM and CPU (and fast disks) to meet the database server overhead for the specs in the release notes. There are other factors which will affect database performance, for example if you have big report logs (for example, do they store multiple GB per day of usage which would necessitate pulling them in more than once a day), how timely do you want live statistics for license usage to be available (ergo, agents updating status every minute, every 5 minutes, every 10 minutes), etc. https://helpnet.flexerasoftware.com/fnmea2019r2/FlexNet%20Manager%20for%20Engineering%20Applications%202019%20R2%20Release%20Notes.pdf Answer 2: The analytics versions for FNMS and FNMEA currently use different passthrough authentication, so you will need to have two different analytics servers and two different analytics databases.

bferring · ‎Dec 06, 2019

@nalinih You can find the OS compatibility information out on HelpNet for your version of FNMS under the following... FlexNet Manager Suite System Requirements and Compatibility (2019)

bferring · ‎May 21, 2019

Feel free to post questions for FlexNet Manager for Engineering Applications here! It also falls under the FlexNet Manager umbrella and there are members and moderators who view this forum who are familiar with the product.

bferring · ‎May 10, 2019

Are there any documented recommendations for using LM_PROJECT on the client side? The primary use case for my question is a customer who has multiple projects that their employees need to bill hours toward and wants to track the usage of the engineering apps towards these projects. They don't want their users to have to manually set environment variables every time. Are there some batch files/scripts available for public consumption to automate? Also, for Windows systems, is the environment variable preferable to the registry entry (I would assume in this case, yes) and can someone provide me the format of the registry entry for LM_PROJECT? I know it goes in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\FLEXlm License Manager, but wanted to verify you would simply add a String value called LM_PROJECT to that registry key and populate with the project name (and any other caveats like no special characters).

bferring · ‎Apr 18, 2019

As for the Database Cleanup, they want to be able to schedule say a 30 day cleanup to run weekly without having to go in and manually click Execute Now (remove the manual process). As for the scan randomization, the upper limit is 60 minutes, but even with 60 minutes, some of their scans will error out when trying to upload scan results with a HTTP 500 error (during heavy scan volume). They're using the in-memory CLI scan method via SCCM using -si 60. They scan over the weekend within certain windows (they do not want to scan on weekdays). I had suggested they could break the scan groups up further, but they're already broken up into 3 collections to eliminate some of the errors with results not reporting back to the cloud. The simple fix in their opinion would be to have the option to randomize over 2 hours (or 3 hours...have a higher upper limit).

bferring · ‎Apr 18, 2019

I recently had a customer that suggested the following enhancements, most around blacklisting: Would like to schedule the DB cleanup to cleanup aged scan results rather than manually having to do this every month Would like to add the ability to right-click and add a file path to blacklist Blacklist report to be able to review just in case Ability to import/export a blacklist and have a global blacklist for all users Randomization of agent scans from 60 minutes to 120 minutes to avoid 500 errors during heavier scan times

bferring · ‎Apr 09, 2019

I was also unable to query a free version of ESXi via the normal beacon method of collecting VMware inventory. It appears to be a limitation with ESXi limiting the functionality of the API. From the following URL: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1023990 vCLI, PowerCLI, and vSphere SDK for Perl are limited to read-only access for the free vSphere Hypervisor edition. To enable full functionality of vCLI on a VMware ESXi host, the host must be licensed with vSphere Essentials, vSphere Essential Plus, vSphere Standard, vSphere Advanced, vSphere Enterprise, or vSphere Enterprise Plus. Other Related Info: http://www.doublecloud.org/2011/01/free-esxi-and-apicli-support/

bferring · ‎Apr 09, 2019

Has anyone seen the following error when importing O365 inventory on FNMS 2018 R2? It repeats over and over in the upload logs. 2019-04-04 00:00:00,823 [Upload.UploadProcess ] [INFO ] Found 1 new package(s) to upload 2019-04-04 00:00:00,854 [Upload.UploadProcess ] [ERROR] Package upload failed System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. at Flexera.SaaS.Transport.Upload.UploadProcess.ProcessPackageList(Int32 exitCode, List`1 packages)

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Re: SAP connectivity and beacon requirement

Re: Cognos Analytics authentication

Re: Oracle Stand-alone Inventory Agent for FlexNet Manager Suite

Re: Server requirements for FNMEA

Re: Windows NT inventory using Remote Excecution

Feel Free to Post Questions for FlexNet Manager for Engineering Applications Here!

Automating the use of LM_PROJECT on the client side

Re: We Still Want Your Ideas about Software Vulnerability Management Products!

Re: We Still Want Your Ideas about Software Vulnerability Management Products!

Re: Query SDK of free version of VMware ESX

O365 Upload Issues

Re: SAP connectivity and beacon requirement

Re: Cognos Analytics authentication

Re: Oracle Stand-alone Inventory Agent for FlexNet Manager Suite

Re: Server requirements for FNMEA

Re: Windows NT inventory using Remote Excecution

Feel Free to Post Questions for FlexNet Manager for Engineering Applications Here!

Automating the use of LM_PROJECT on the client side

Re: We Still Want Your Ideas about Software Vulnerability Management Products!

Re: We Still Want Your Ideas about Software Vulnerability Management Products!

Re: Query SDK of free version of VMware ESX