BigFix Inventory 9.2.3 is now available

Usage and Config BFI
1

IBM is pleased to announce that BigFix Inventory 9.2.3 is available.

This update improves the reporting effectiveness and flexibility of BigFix Inventory as well as expands on its value to mitigate security risks.

The key features that are delivered in this update include:

  • Support for Unicode. It allows to easily manage international environments and specific country language settings across computers in different geographical locations. Data is now encoded into the UTF-8 format so that it is properly displayed and interpreted by BigFix. It removes the need to set dedicated code-pages to workaround previous limitations.
  • Conditional email notifications and flexible date filtering on all of the available reports. The feature allows to aggregate the inventory according to flexible date filtering criteria as well as send e-mail notifications to interested parties when pre-configured alerting conditions are met.
  • iSeries support for IBM product discovery and subcapacity licensing reporting. The feature is currently delivered as a supported limited availability feature.
  • Collecting MD5 and SHA256 hash key file checksums to mitigate security risks. The feature allows IT Operations and SAM departments to closely cooperate with security teams by collecting key security attributes as part of the software discovery process to properly identify security exposures.

For a full list of new features as well as APARs that are fixed with this application update, see: http://ibm.biz/bfi_update_923.

Documentation for BigFix Inventory is available under the following link: http://ibm.biz/bfi_923_docs.

2

Any chance there are improvements in the Computer Groups process? It would be really nice to use the same computer groups that are in the BigFix Console and not have to reinvent the wheel. We have groups already created based on region/site and would make reporting a lot easier if we can use these automatic groups.

I am excited for the MD5/SHA256 hash properties, would be pretty interesting to pull a dump of the unique MD5’s in the environment and query it up against a list of IOC’s. Could be a very telling story if a machine is being owned.

3

When it comes to the computer groups, I know it might not be a perfect solution to your problem, but when you have computer groups created in the BigFix Console, you can use them to create analogical groups in BigFix Inventory.

You simply go to the Computer Groups panel in BigFix Inventory and choose the following filtering criteria:

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In my case, Customer1g etc. are groups that were previously created in the BigFix Console. This is not automatic copying of groups from the Console to Inventory, but might speed up things a bit.