Why would I want to run the capacity scanner against my workstations. It seems that the capacity scanner is just for servers. The capacity scan gathers hardware information about your endpoints, which is required to properly calculate the license consumption. There isn’t anything about workstation hardware that would relate to license consumption, as far as I know.
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Just speculating, but it might be required if you want to see hardware info in Inventory for your non-servers. Like if you are using it to measure usage of Photoshop and want to see is it a Desktop/Laptop system and other specs.
Is there anyone out there who is running the BFI capacity scan every 30 minutes on their PCs? I am thinking about running it every 7 days like a software scan. It seems overkill and unnecessary overhead to run the capacity scan every 30 minutes on PCs.
What’s the concern with letting it run? It’s very lightweight, basically just a count of processors & cores on the machine.
There were some software products, mostly from IBM I think, that were licensed by PVUs and part of the license terms requires an auditing tool & frequency of the collection.
As long as you’re not using that type of license it should be fine to collect less frequently, I’m just trying to understand the issue with it?
This recently came to my attention for one of our groups that are exploring ILMT, which I guess is just a cut down version of BFI from the IBM days.
From my perspective I only want the endpoints and agent doing and logging things it needs to do. Its quite a bit of repetitive log “noise” with a repeating 30 mins action, more action status events to send up the infra and I’m always cautious about actions with that level of re-run frequency locking up on a waithidden and impeding more important actions from running. I’d probably want to use a much less frequent scan for the physical devices where the CPU/cores in unlikely to change and maybe limit more frequent scans to VMs that may scale up or down on a dynamic basis.
Just my personal view as some feedback 
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https://help.hcltechsw.com/bigfix/10.0/inventory/Inventory/planinconf/c_frequency_scans_uploads.html
Please see the Comments section for Capacity Scan for more information
Our environment is servers-only, so won’t be able to help you with your use case but what I would suggest is to look into what you use BFI for. If IBM License metrics is something you do through BFI then you need to look at at IBM’s licensing requirements. Fairly certain, they mandate capacity scan ran every 30 mins; software scans once a week; etc (all those pre-built defaults within BFI fixlets are essentially there to make sure the tool is out-of-box compliant with IBM License Metrics policies). If you get an IBM auditor through the door they will ask you to show them those frequencies and if they are not recommended they may penalize you (and licensing violation can be extremely costly, so be careful)… If you don’t care about IBM Licensing and Auditing, and that is not what you use BFI for then you can select your own frequencies! As far as I am aware no other software vendor has as stringent and as specific scanning requirements than IBM…
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