Confusing results in BES Deployment Health Checks dashboard?

(imported topic written by peterd91)

Hello,

I have the below concerns about the results I see under BES Deployment Health Checks dashboard. It is BES 7.0.9.164 deployment.

  1. Gather Status

In results, it says:

BES Relay: Number of Gather Errors
: 10

The description of this check refers to the

GatherStatus.xml

file, but I can’t find such. I only see one called GatherState.xml and unsure where to look. Is there any KB article with more details on that?

  1. Too Many Offline Computers

Results:

Number of Offline Computers: 29 (107.4%)

In my console, as master operator, I see a total of 27 computers and only 12 of them are offline. Why is the dashboard showing different numbers?

  1. Expired Computers

It should show the computers that have not reported in for over 1 month. The results section shows a link that says

19 Computers

and when I click on it, it shows Ad-Hoc group which contains only 2 computers. I am confused. Where is this 19 computers come from? Is it counting the deleted computers as well?

  1. Deprecated Fixlet Sites

The site

Client Manager for Spyware Tools

is listed there. Is this site no longer supported by BigFix or has been replaced by a new one?

  1. On this same deployment, in the

BES Deployment Overview

dashboard, it says:

BES Agents Reported in the Last Day: 15 (55.5%)
BES Licenses in Use: 15 / 100 (15%)

In the console, I see 15 online and 12 offline computers. Is this true that only the online computers consume licenses? In the above example where I have 100 licenses, if one day 120 computers report to this server, some computers may become restricted. How this will be determined? Will these be the ones most recently installed or those who last reported?

Thanks,

Peter

(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)

Hi Peter,

  1. You are right, its the GatherState.xml file (C:\Program Files\BigFix Enterprise\BES Server\Mirror Server\Inbox)

2 & 3. Something certainly seems out of place here. These two checks look at the ‘Last Report Time’ property to do their analysis and basically what’s happening is that property is returning more results than there are computer. I would suggest you try reloading the BES Console cache and see if that fixes the problem.

http://support.bigfix.com/cgi-bin/kbdirect.pl?id=233

  1. It looks like we still support the spybot tool through that site so I’m not sure why it is on the list. I’ll follow up but we’ll probably remove the site from that health check since its still active. We do have plans to move the site into a general EndPoint Protection Tool site which encompasses Anti-Virus and Anti-SpyWare tools but that hasn’t happened yet. So, at some point in the near future the site will be unsupported but it is currently active.

  2. The license allocation system expires client licenses if an agent hasn’t been heard from in 24 hours and frees up the license for another client. If an agent is reporting in actively it will continue to use its license and run normally, however, if it doesn’t report in for a few days and you are over your seat limit it’s possible for another agent to take that license and cause the first agent to be restricted the next time it reports in. The system is trying to give you 100 seats for ‘active’ agents and automatically expires inactive clients for you. If you are over your seat limit however, some clients will be restricted and you probably need to add additional seat counts to your license.

(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)

Updates to the dashboard coming soon:

  1. Removed the Client Manager for Spyware Tools site from the deprecated sites list.

  2. Added deprecated sites ‘BigFix AntiPest (powered by PestPatrol)’ and ‘BigFix AntiVirus (powered by CA eTrust)’. These sites have been replaced with a new version called just ‘BigFix AntiPest’ and ‘BigFix AntiVirus’ which are basically the 2.0 version of the sites.

(imported comment written by peterd91)

Hi Tyler,

Thanks for the excellent information you provided.

Clearing the console cache did fix the issue and now I see ‘good’ results.

Regarding the deprecated sites, I did have both ‘BigFix AntiPest (powered by PestPatrol)’ and ‘BigFix AntiVirus (powered by CA eTrust)’ and now they both show up there, I will be removing them… I also noticed the BESAdmin-Announcements on that. Thanks again for your fast response and updates.

Cheers,

Peter.