Custom timestamp and Last Report Time

jgallas 2021-02-12 19:31:58 UTC #1

Under some circumstances we have observed computers that report into BigFix but have issues where they cannot run fixlets. In those cases simply removing and re-installing the BigFix agent seems to resolve the issue. Therefore we would like to create a custom registry key called AgentHealthCheck and run a fixlet once a day to stamp the time the fixlet ran in the registry key and then compare it with Last Report Time. It shouldn’t deviate more than a day (or even a few hours) from this timestamp. I’m thinking a custom web report would be necessary to get this info and process the comparison but how do I format both the timestamp so that it is comparable to Last Report Time and how would I write the relevance to find computers that are connected to BigFix but not doing anything?

JasonWalker 2021-02-12 20:37:59 UTC #2

Something like a polling action? Maybe just apply it as a client setting?

setting "MyHealthCheck"="{now}" on "{now}" for client

Comparing times in Web Reports is a little tricky, but if it’s able to keep reporting in this state you could make it an Analysis Property:

MyHealthCheck Expired:

exists setting "MyHealthCheck" whose (now - value of it as time > 1 * day) of client

Should return “True” if the value hasn’t updated within the last day. You’d need to schedule this Task Action to “Repeat while relevant, waiting X hours between reapplications” and make it reapply more frequently than once per day.

You’d want the filters on a Web Report to catch computers with “Last Report Time” more than a day old OR “MyHealthCheckExpired” gives ‘True’

jgallas 2021-02-12 20:47:40 UTC #3

Nice! I’ll try this thank you!

jgallas 2021-02-15 21:30:52 UTC #4

I ended up going with a report of computers that have checked in within the last day AND that have the “true” result from the analysis. After the weekend there were 6 computers that showed up on my report (5 of which had since updated themselves once I checked on them and were no longer relevant) however there was one computer that had a BigFix agent problem since it hadn’t run the task to update MyHealthCheck since Friday. I ended up reinstalling the agent and now it’s working fine. I’m hoping this will help me find any others that have issues in the future thanks again!