Duplicate Client Instances after Configuring VM Managers

Usage and Config
1

We recently added the Inventory module into our BigFix environment. After installing and configuring the VM Managers, now most of the clients are listed twice. Once with no icon and another entry with an icon resembling two side by side servers. I tried removing all clients from the database and let the clients check back in but most are still checking back in twice. How can I clear up the duplicate entries so I have a clean view of how many systems I have in BigFix?

2

Did you ever figure this out? I recently enabled the ESX proxy agents and now have duplicate entries for the virtual machines that have the BigFix agent installed.

3

I think this falls under “works as intended, but annoying”

Proxy Agents can be used to manage things with BigFix that could otherwise never be used with BigFix. In these cases, things showing up in BigFix due to a Proxy Agent only show up once.

Proxy Agents can also be used to allow BigFix to manage aspects of something that would otherwise be impossible with the normal BigFix agent. In this case, it shows up twice, but with different capabilities and purpose. The regular agent works as any other would, but then the Proxy Agent version that shows up can only do special and limited things.

Managing VMs is one of the cases where a system will show up twice in BigFix if it is being managed with both the proxy agent and the regular agent, which is generally how it should be. It is definitely annoying, but they provide different functions. It would be useful if the view could be collapsed into 1 entry, but that would require some sort of mechanism to definitively determine that they are the same system, but then it would also require a way to differentiate them depending on what you are trying to accomplish when you take action to affect them.

If you are managing a Printer with a BigFix proxy agent, then it would only show up once, because it is generally impossible to manage printers with the traditional agent. The same goes for @strawgate 's BETA proxy agent for inventorying Cisco ASAs.

4

Fair enough. So, I pull some data from the Web Reports API and want to filter duplicates. I’m hoping I can filter machines that do not have a value for “Virtual Machine UUID”. Here is what I currently have, but can not get the “and not Virtual Machine UUID” in the right place…

(id of it, name of it, value of result (bes property "OS Name - Unix", it) as string | operating system of it | "Not Set") of members of bes computer groups whose (id of it = 32908)

I’m not really sure where in there I would add something to filter on not having a value for “Virtual Machine UUID” property…

5

There is a flag for Proxy Agent, I would just use that:

(it, multiplicity of it) of unique values of agent types of bes computers

names of bes computers whose("Native" = agent type of it)

Reference: https://developer.bigfix.com/relevance/reference/bes-computer.html#agent-type-of-bes-computer-string

7

That did it! Thanks for the heads up on agent type @jgstew

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8

If you ever get involved with OS Deployment and Bare Metal Imaging, you’ll also see Proxy Agent instances for the “Bare Metal Clients”. Checking the ‘agent type of it’ is correct for identifying those as well.

You’ll likely want to ensure that either the non-native clients are not subscribed to your custom sites, or filter them out in any Fixlet/Task relevance you use. The Relevance check would be

if exists property "in proxy agent context" then not in proxy agent context else true

You could add that to either Fixlet/Task/Baseline relevance, or the Site Subscriptions criteria for your custom sites.

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9

Oh, good idea! That makes a lot of sense, and would prevent them from having actions deployed to them from those sites.

10

Yeah, and if you need to look at the proxy agents’ logs, it’ll reduce a lot of evaluation error messages when the proxy attempts to evaluate things like “registry” and “file” that don’t exist as proxy inspectors.

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11

@jgstew or @strawgate Do either of you know if the proxy agent count of machines (in this case, the duplicate machines) goes towards licensing for BigFix? So if I have 10 licenses and the agent installed on 10 virtual machines but those same 10 virtual machines are detected by the proxy agent, does that count as 10 used licenses or 20?

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12

I believe, as licenses are based on per managed device/per managed core and not based on number of entries in the console (re-imaging the same device 30 times does not consume 30 licenses) that you should be fine.

You may wish to check with whomever you purchase your licenses from to determine how to track this as I don’t typically deal with licensing.

Sorry

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13

I agree with @strawgate … the only way to know for sure it to talk to IBM about it, but I don’t believe Proxy Agents, particularly of computers that are already counted for a license, are counted again against the license count.

That said, I believe the old and discontinued BigFix MDM product made use of proxy agents to manage devices through MDM and those would count against the MDM license count, but they only show up once in the console, not twice.

14

I don’t know about the licensing question but the old MDM product DID show up as potentially multiple devices controlled by different paths depending on the extender you used.

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