How to maintain your BigFix Inventory environment health

BigFix Inventory discovers software, processes, file systems, and hardware across operating systems in your infrastructure. It helps you to analyse the consumption data and allows you to generate reports. It provides useful features for managing physical and virtualized environments. It maintains software audit readiness and mitigate security risks with software compliance and usage management.

It is highly important to keep your BigFix Inventory environment up to date to ensure smooth software asset management.

Below are the health-check recommendations for maintaining BigFix Inventory environment:

1. Check the Overview Dashboard of BigFix Inventory

The dashboard provides with a quick access to information about deployments, scans, computers, and software assets in your infrastructure.

BigFix Inventory has two versions of overview dashboard.

1. 1 New dashboard

This dashboard i available from BigFix Inventory version 10.0.2.0. It provides information on Vendor specific predefined reports, summary of the selected inventory reports and a preview of the security features.

The above colour coding depicts the type.

1. Blue – Information.
2. Orange – Alert. Necessary action needs to be applied to overcome this alert.
3. Green – No Alert.
   1. 2. Previous dashboard

To access this dashboard, click on ‘Go to the previous version’. This provides insight on health of deployment, scans, contracts, and catalog.

Each of these widgets provide links to troubleshooting documentation or additional information on related topics for easy reference.

Look out for warning symbols to be informed of any updates or issues.

2. To Do List

This feature provides you with information about items that might require your attention in case of any critical issues such as data import failure, issues with VM Manager and availability of a new version of BigFix Inventory / scan fixlets.

Refer to the below documentation for more information provided in To Do List.

https://help.hcltechsw.com/bigfix/10.0/inventory/Inventory/overview/c_to_do_list.html

3. Maintaining BigFix Inventory components (Scanner, Scan fixlets, Catalog, VM Tool) up to date in line with the latest releases.

When new content of BigFix Inventory is released, the site gets updated automatically with the latest information.

To check the latest information of fixlets and tasks, navigate to below path:

Login to BigFix Console -> Go to Sites -> Go to External Sites -> Select BigFix Inventory v10 -> Check Fixlets and Tasks.

Verify if the current actions running matches the latest version of fixlets and tasks available in the site. Else, stop the existing ones and schedule new actions with the latest fixlets and tasks.

To verify this, check the actions in open state under BigFix Inventory v10 site.

4. Check for new application features, defect fixes, enhancements, and end of support.

BigFix Inventory version update will be released quarterly. This contains the BigFix Inventory server, scanner, scan fixlets and catalog updates along with new features, enhancements, and defect fixes.

HCL also releases BigFix Inventory Catalog updates in between the application updates. This contains latest software catalog, new features, and defect fixes.

For more information, refer to below articles.

Release Announcement: https://forum.bigfix.com/c/release-announcements/inventory

Release Notes: https://help.hcltechsw.com/bigfix/10.0/inventory/Inventory/overview/Release_notes.html

5. Import health check

Data import is a process which transfers the data from BigFix database to BigFix Inventory database. BigFix database contains the information about the data collected from endpoints through scans, infrastructure, detected software, new catalog availability and more.

Ensuring successful data imports is important so that any changes that happens on the endpoint is detected and the same is updated in BigFix Inventory.

To check the status of Data Imports, navigate to BigFix Inventory -> Management -> Data imports.

To troubleshoot any failures, click on the Download button to download the import log and check if any errors.

6. VM Manager health check

VM Manager panel provides information about all the VM Managers configured in BigFix Inventory.

To access VM Managers panel, navigate to BigFix Inventory -> Management -> VM Managers.

Check the operation status of the VMs for any issues. Click on each status to see more information about it and action required to resolve the issue.

Conclusion:

The above health check recommendations help to maintain the BigFix Inventory environment up to date. This also helps to avoid unexpected surprises and bigger maintenance issues.