Schedule Inventory Scan

Hi,
It seems that our inventory scans are kicking off on Thursdays in the middle of the day and slowing down users and servers. Luckily we haven’t deployed to production servers yet but the lower environments are seeing the scan running in the middle of the day. I checked the agent log to verify that’s the case. How can I schedule all of my scans to run at a specific time on the weekend? Thank you.

The execution tab of the “Take Action” dialogue provides you with several options to control when scans run. Depending on how many machines you have, it is also good idea to break scanning up into groups so that you do not create a big flood of traffic all at once and backup your relays or the root server. You can also throttle the CPU use to minimize the impact on users. Take a look at this page of the product guide: https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SSKLLW_9.5.0/com.ibm.bigfix.inventory.doc/Inventory/planinconf/t_scheduling_soft_scans.html

Thanks for that information! I am scheduling my PCs to run nightly during off-hours and I’ll schedule my servers to run on the weekend. How can I do the same for the hardware/OS info?

You will need to be more specific about how/what you are using to capture that info. But for now I will assume you are referring to an analysis (a grouping of individual properties). The properties within an analysis are updated based on a specified time period (aka. frequency) vs. a schedule like what you saw in the take action dialogue. You can see screenshots of that here (notice the “Evaluate Every” option): https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/en/SS63NW_9.5.0/com.ibm.bigfix.doc/Platform/Console/c_editing_analyses.html

You can set a client setting (this isn’t a native client setting) that randomly assigns endpoints to a scan group. Then you deploy a scan action to each group based on the client setting.

setting "_BESClient_UsageManager_ScanGroup"="{item 1 of item 1 of (computer id mod 2, (0,"SG-1"; 1,"SG-2")) whose (item 0 of it = item 0 of item 1 of it)}" on "{now}" for client

Sorry, I might have been unclear. Shouldn’t the asset inventory at a hardware and operating system level also be captured and reported on? I’m not sure if analysis does that.