Archiving BigFix actions

[Rackham]

Any suggestions for how to archive old (expired) BigFix actions from the console? I’ve tried exporting the actions, but they are missing the following pieces:

• Which endpoints the action ran on
• What actions were actually performed (the contents of the current action by the same name may no longer reflect the actions actually performed on the machine months or years ago).

I see this information all contained in the action in the console, but export and report views don’t give me the option to get at that info.

I need to save this information as part of an audit trail for the work that BigFix performed on the systems.

[gearoid]

Try using a Web Report or using the REST API to get the data into file and then store in your archives.
If you were using an ETL tool you could consider connecting that directly to the REST API for data extraction.
There’s also the database views which you could SQL query from.

[dan_obiedzinski]

Did anyone ever try what gearoid suggested or anything else?

[JonL]

Folks are using various homebrew solutions. I wish IBM would have a secondary database option as an archive/audit location. Preferably with settings like ‘migrate over to secondary after x days’.

Keeping history for audit would be a big win considering we need to keep it fairly clean for performance reasons.

[oki2oki]

Hi,
This was asked in '16. Any progress? I also would like to have archived feature where we can move actions to another DB so that it doesn’t slow down our console and BigFix in general.

Thanks

[Rackham]

None that I know of. I don’t consider the suggestion to use WebReports as a viable option for me, since I cannot find a way to show which specific endpoints on which the action ran, which ones completed successfully, etc.

It would be great to see the BESAdmin tool have a feature to automatically archive stopped/expired actions after xx days, similar to what is done with computers.

[Rackham]

I just created a BigFIx Platform RFE for this. Feel free to vote for it if you want to see this function.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rfe/execute?use_case=viewRfe&CR_ID=127380

[JonL]

I added my vote for the RFE. I also added a comment to the RFE expressing the desire for an online archive database option in addition to the off-line option. This would tie in nicely with another enhancement for true item versioning versus making a copy and updating the name.

[mndbndr]

Hi Guys,

I not this is a really late reply, but I have been pinged a few times today on this here in the forums, so I thought II would share here as well.

Here are 2 other posts where this topic is being discussed:

Exporting Actions for Archiving

Yes, we would just like an option to export all issued actions for audit ability. Something that would do this automatically each day or week and be able to run a report to have some form of historical reporting. How can I evaluate this further?

Anyone ever see a demo of a custom built Action Warehouse (written by a former IBMer, now HCL)?

I’ve seen it a couple of times at user groups, but I can’t find anything about it anywhere and I can’t recall his name. He built it with a web interface to look up closed/stopped/deleted actions because the customer he wrote it for had too many actions and had to constantly delete them…I do remember he used ‘mungodb’ for the backend. Anyone know what I’m talking about?

As stated above, a custom developed solution is currently the only way to go and using the REST API is the answer. I was able to grab all the data points listed above.

The first post lists a quick summary of what I did.

I cannot distribute code, but I can definitely talk about it. Full disclosure, I currently am an Enterprise Architect in the HCL BigFix Professional Services team.