(imported topic written by rharmer91)
We have around 13,000 agents deployed. I was curious if anyone had about the same size deployment and if any issues with application tracking any/or any revelations on it’s use.
Thanks!
Rich
(imported comment written by brolly3391)
rharmer,
Our deployment is approx 6000 agents.
We do most of our application tracking using SMS 2003 in my shop. It’s built in and easy to use.
If I were to use BigFix for full time 100% application tracking, whatever method I ended up using, I would want to see the version string of the application as my tracking item. I am really not sure what would be considered a best practice in terms of performance and useability.
There are two retrieved properties called Registered Applications and Installed Applications available under the Application section here: http://support.bigfix.com/bes/misc/retrievedproperties.html
You could then use web reporting on those properties to get counts of application by version. This would probably be the lowest overhead from the BES Client/Console point of view.
These properties don’t work so well directly in the console though as they are lists instead of discrete entries. Makes it hard to answer: “how many machines have both Acrobat Reader 5.0 and Acrobat Reader 6.0 installed” without leaving the console.
Other approaches with varying results:
I might want a retrieved property for every application that I was tracking. I would give them a long re-evaluation time They would return the version of the application. Once a day would probably be sufficient in most cases. I like this idea the best, but the console gets really messy with all those retrieved properties showing up. Maybe an analysis would work better for this. It’s nice because you usually will not have to write new code when a new version of a given application rolls out. Both of these require the intervention of a master operator. Also, what if there are 2 versions of the same application installed?
I might want to make tasks with relevance to detect a specific version of an application but no action. This gets boring becuase you need a new task for every app/version combination you want to track but you can do it without being a master operator. Effective but not efficient.
I might want to make automatic groups by application but my instincts tell me this would not work out the way I would want it to.
I might want a whole new tab on the BES Console called Applications that track retrieved properties designed to track application versions. These properties would only show up on the new tab and not show up on the Computers tab. Maybe we will get something like this in version 7?
What a great item to have a wizard for… “Track application” where you supply a reg key to a version or a reg key to a folder that contains a file that will be version checked or a hard coded folder name that contains a file that will be version checked in a consistent, best practice sort of fashion that has results that appear in a sortable, useable fashion in a new tab in the BES console.
Cheers,
Brolly