BigFix as Server Management and documentation tool?

(imported topic written by Gallus2391)

Hi All,

Is it possible to use Bigfix to retrieve a registry key or a text file and use this information to populate colunms that my team could use to determine …

Who the machine is supported by (internally)

What project a server is assigned to.

Who the machine is maintained by

Where the machine is located (as I can’t use the Subnet)

Essentially its all manual information that if I could combine it with all the other great stuff BigFix gives me I’d end up with a centralised view of all my server documentation…

I’m new to bigfix so any help would be of assistance…

Thanks

Mike.

(imported comment written by brolly3391)

Hello Mike and welcome to the Forums,

This is indeed a good and relatively easy thing to do with BigFix.

For example if you have an existing inventory registry hive:

HKLM\software\inventory

SupportedBy = Internal IT

Then a Master operator could create a retrieved property to show this value in the console for every PC. Tools>Manage Properties>Add New

Name

“Support Group”

Relevance

name of operating system starts with “win” AND (if (exists key “HKLM\software\inventory” whose (exists value “SupportedBy” of it) of registry) then (value “SupportedBy” of key “HKLM\software\inventory” of registry as string) else (“Key or value Missing”))

You can substitute other values from your registry in the above relevance to create other properties you want to track.

You can do a similar thing with inspecting a known file for configuration data that you want to report in the console or Web Reports.

The relevance would look something like this:

following texts of lasts “=” of lines whose (it contains “SupportedBy”) of file “myinventory.txt” of folder “c:\inventory”

Play around with those and if you get stumped, post your relevance so far and what you were trying to achieve and we will help you out.

Cheers,

Brolly

(imported comment written by Gallus2391)

Great. Thanks for the Help I’ll give it a whirl…

(imported comment written by Gallus2391)

Do you know if its possible for the Fixlet to Prompt for a value that the operator can enter. And the the fixlet can deploy this value to the registry Key ?

(imported comment written by jessewk)

You can use the 'Windows Registry Wizard" under the Wizards menu to create a fixlet that will set the value.

Alternatively, you can create a Fixlet that prompts the console operator for the value using the ‘action parameter’ action statement. Usage details are in the Windows Action Language guide, or you can search the Fixlets on your Fixlets tab to find an example to copy. You can find the language guide here:

http://support.bigfix.com/fixlet/

-Jesse