Exporting Actions for Archiving

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Hello,

I have been in contact with BigFix support and they didn’t have an “out of box” method for BigFix action archiving for historical reporting. Does anyone have a method that they utilize to export stopped/expired actions that would include the action details (Target, Completion status total, completion status per targeted endpoint, etc)? Basically everything you see from the action pane in the BF console is what I would like to be able to keep some sort of historical report on prior to running the BF DB cleanup tools to cleanup deleted actions. If that method is a DB dump I am fine with that. I just want to identify the best manner to proceed here.

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There is at least one Request for Enhancement (RFE) that seeks either offline (flat file) or online secondary database to warehouse this information without bogging down the main app and database. I’d encourage you to vote for it. There are other forum threads on this topic too.

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Do you happen to have links to the RFE? I’d be happy to vote for it. I am also curious what others (if any) are doing to accomplish action logging.

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Here is one of the RFEs that is under consideration. I’d encourage you to add your comments to this use case.

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There is an Action Archiver that Brent Irwin presented at the Oct user group in Emeryville last fall. Its an external solution tied to reporting and a dashboard that I am looking at now. He uses an api dump to an external MongoDB
I believe it is being presented as an HCL product.

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Meydey,

Do you have a link or more insight so I can look into this further?

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Thanks for providing the link. I went over and voted for it

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Hi @Austin4778,

Sorry for the very delayed reply. I came across this post when looking for a different post on the same topic: Anyone ever see a demo of a custom built Action Warehouse (written by a former IBMer, now HCL)?

@Meydey was referring to me.

A few points of correct, however, I do now work for HCL BigFix Professional Services as an Enterprise Architect. We are not offering our Actions Archive as a “product”, but as a “service”. There is a big difference in that nomenclature.

Are you still looking for options?

Here is a screenshot of what I showed off at the Emeryville BigFix User Group last year:

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image1919×1051 296 KB

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Yes, we would just like an option to export all issued actions for audit ability. Something that would do this automatically each day or week and be able to run a report to have some form of historical reporting. How can I evaluate this further?

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Sure. I would be happy to have a GotoMeeting session next week with you where I can show you what I have done and we can discuss your options. Send me your availability at brent.irwin@hcl.com and I will setup the meeting.

Here is a quick overview of my design:

  • Completely runs in Docker containers, making it very portable and lightweight. The whole thing can run on my laptop in full production mode. That is how I showed it at the BUG.
  • I have setup a total of 4 containers, NGINX as a reverse proxy to to Node.js web app. An additional container running NGINX as a CDN for downloaded assets, like images, javascript and css. Last container is a MongoDB database.
  • In the 3 months before I left for HCL, we had collected over 26K top level actions and over 2M member actions. Database was still under 1GB. I had calculated that an entire years worth of collection would only consume 5GB of disk space.
  • I checked back in with the company 3 months later and they had doubled everything at over 52K top level actions and did not see any performance reduction in the interface.
  • I had a Node.js script running every 5 minutes pulling newly Stopped and Expired Actions from the BigFix Platform. Entire ETL operated over the REST API with almost zero resource hit on the root server. The script only took 15 seconds to run. So, the Actions Archive was as current as the BigFix Console when it came to data freshness. That allows alot of operators to not need to go into the Console to look for this stuff. They just used my Actions Archive.
  • My code collected all data points about Action objects, Fixlet objects, User objects, Computer objects, and result data from all those objects.
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@mndbndr I must apologize now for the lengthy delay… I would like to see if this is still an option? Is there an additional cost? If so, what is the cost and how is it priced? I think this sounds exactly like something we need. Please let me know at your earliest convenience.

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Hi Austin, yes, I would love to have a quick GotoMeeting session so you can see what I had created in the past. What date and time next week works best for you? You can contact me off forum as well at brent.irwin@hcl.com.

Currently, this Actions Archive is not available as a “product”, but can be re-created for you via an HCL BigFix Professional Services engagement. What the cost would be, I do not know. You would need to engage our team to create a quote for you on this. We can discuss more specifics on the GotoMeeting.

Let me know.

Thanks,

Brent