Hello
We have around 15 Baselines(policies) and every new installed PC become relevant randomly to those Baselines
my question is , if it any way to set priority order witch Baseline will be first client become relevant for it?
Julia
Julia,
You cannot directly influence which baseline the client starts applying first.
To make a long story short if something truly needs to run in a certain order then that order should be dictated using relevance – if the client sees an action as relevant it will run it in whatever order it decides
That being said – you can do some creative things with relevance and client settings to make it so baselines aren’t relevant until they are ready to be applied using the age of the client or some form of client tagging for instance.
Age of Client
You could include in your baseline relevance something like:
minimum of subscribe times of sites < now - 2*day
This would make the baseline only relevant if the computer is more than two days old. This could be useful for you to apply to any patching baselines but not software distribution baselines so that new clients get their intended software first and patched second.
Client Settings
You could add a step to your patching baselines that adds a client setting, “2015 Patching Done” for instance, and then your other baselines could check for the existence of this client setting before running.
2 Likes
Thank you for replay. i will try it.
Another question, is it possible when after the client become visible in the console, what one specific Baseline will start immediately?
some times it can take more than two, free hours to become applicable… I trying to understand why and what can i do to change it.
Julia
Hey,
How large is your environment? Do you have a lot of sites, groups, or baselines?
I would maybe start with looking at increasing the CPU Usage of our clients or looking at the logs on the client to figure out what it’s doing during that time.
If you dynamically target the baseline all new devices that come up will apply the baseline as soon as they find out about it.
1 Like
Hi
we have 7k+ clients
53 sites
224 computer groups
relevant baselines 45
non relevant baselines 93
Hey,
Is there a good reason you’ve got so many sites and computer groups?
When the client initializes it’s going to spend a very long amount of time working on the site subscriptions, gathering the sites, etc.
I normally just have sites for delegation – most of my environments will look just like this:
- Content
- Content (Archive)
- Endpoints
- Servers
Do you currently use a clientsettings.cfg file when you deploy your clients?
My recommendation would be to increasing the CPU usage of the client during initial deployment so that it crunches through this stuff faster and then decrease the CPU usage after a set number of hours (we do 8 hours).
Hey
Good question (Is there a good reason you’ve got so many sites and computer groups?) No there are not real good reason for this. i started to work on it but it will take some time to organize all this.
No we don’t use clientsettings.cfg. Can it help us in some way?
how can i increase CPU and decrease it after couple of hours? I know there is “Bes Client Setting - Cpu Usage” is it what your mean?
Julia
Hey,
So the clientsettings.cfg sits next to your BigFix Installer EXE (are you using the MSI?)
You can populate it with settings that the client will get as part of the install
Sample Contents of clientsettings.cfg:
_BESClient_RelaySelect_FailoverRelay=http://myDMZServer:52311/bfmirror/downloads/
_BESClient_Resource_StartupNormalSpeed=1
_BESClient_Download_RetryMinutes=1
_BESClient_Resource_WorkIdle=100
_BESClient_Resource_SleepIdle=400
_BESClient_Comm_CommandPollEnable=1
_BESClient_Comm_CommandPollIntervalSeconds=3600
Place that next to the installer and those settings (in your case the WorkIdle and SleepIdle settings) will be configured on first startup of the client.
You can then make a computer group of machines that are more than like 8 hours old:
minimum of subscribe time of sites < now - 8*hour
And then action a CPU Usage fixlet against that site (like the one in the BES Support site or one from C3 Platform Kickstart)
1 Like
Hi
We deploy images with the client instaled already, run the run script to delete some registry and folders following this article.
We use baseline with all client configuration. Not sure if it possible to use clientsettings.cfg in this way of client deploy.
About the CPU usage its the great idea, thanks i will check it tomorrow
Thank you for your help
Julia
You can include the workidle/sleepidle settings in your image if you’d like as well.
The problem with increasing the CPU after the fact with an action is the client has to process all of the sites/groups/fixlets/baselines etc before it sees the action to increase its CPU so it defeats the benefit a bit
1 Like
Good Morning,
was thinking about this yesterday. The best wil be to add CPU usage in the image and decrease after with task
Julia
Hi @strawgate,
i tried all, still the same story 
the most strange was - no changes in the CPU, i mean after increasing CPU, CPU use only 1/2%
Julia
Hi,
How did you go about increasing the CPU in the image and what do you mean, “CPU usage only 1/2”?
Hi
i added those keys in registry
_BESClient_Resource_WorkIdle=100
_BESClient_Resource_SleepIdle=400
1/2 --> 1% - 2% CPU usage
Julia
Hi –
The BigFix Client log has a preamble that it prints every time it starts that tells you the current CPU Usage of the client:
Current Date: September 26, 2016
Client version 9.2.8.74 built for Windows 5.1 i386 running on WinVer 10.0.14915
Current Balance Settings: Use CPU: True Entitlement: 0 WorkIdle: 25 SleepIdle: 460
Can you make sure that the client is seeing the higher CPU you’re asking it to use?
Bill
He Bill
its what i have
Current Date: September 28, 2016
Client version 9.5.2.56 built for WINVER 6.0 i386 running on WINVER 6.1.7601 i386
Current Balance Settings: Use CPU: True Entitlement: 0 WorkIdle: 100 SleepIdle: 400