@SLB, @D.Dean… any takers? Thanks, for any help you can provide…
I am not sure I understand your request. The property has relevance, what part of that is not producing results you need?
I am not sure what you mean by “tie” to a new software product.
It’s not not clear what your ask is.
Are you looking for BigFix Inventory?
Let me try to clarify… I believe I need to create a custom signature in bfi using the new custom property… is that possible? The problem is this… when I run a software installations report in bfi looking for a specific software package, not all the software instances are being discovered correctly relative to the custom property because the custom property is associated to a server not to an instance of software… but, if I run the same report only looking for all the instances of the new custom property they all seem to be there, again because it it related to a server not a software instance… therefore, it seems like the association between the custom property and the software is not all there… hence, if I could create a custom signature for a specific software package and relate that to the custom property in bfi I believe that would solve this problem… Does that help? Thanks, for the help!
I think we may have an XY Problem here, so if you don’t mind I’d like to step back for a minute.
It seems like you have some process that is creating these text files to indicate you have some piece of software installed. And I suspect you have a lot of these files, i.e. one unique file for each software install. Is that right?
What process do you have that actually detects the installed software and creates these files? Do you have any control over that process?
One thing that might make this quite a bit simpler,.if you have control over the tool that generates these text files, would be to generate the file as XML-formatted .swidtag files. BigFix Inventory supports those out-of-the-box, so you shouldn’t even need to create custom signatures if you could create .swidtag files instead.
If you don’t have control over that, or cannot change it, then it might be simpler to look at how your custom tool is detecting the software installs to begin with, and reproduce that detection method as a set of Inventory signature. By that I mean looking for the program executable, or registry entry, or whatever the “real” detection is, rather than creating some new unique BigFix property for each unique piece of software.
Is any of that making sense? Could you talk a bit more about this overall process?
HI Jason, Yes, The process you describe is the install of the software itself. It creates the text file with the version in it as it installs the software. And, yes… there are 1000’s of instances. Unfortunately, it cannot create swidtags… only the text files with the version in them.
The only process we have that detects the installed software and these files is Bigfix. It sounds like you are saying that it would be better to scrap the custom property using the text files with the version in it and just create a custom signature using the normal options available to a custom signature.
So, let me ask it this way… is there anyway to create a custom signature using that text file that is created during the software install or a custom signature using the custom property that I’ve created already? Thanks, for your help with this. I really do appreciate it.
If the Text file is on the endpoint, the BFI custom signature sounds like a strong way to go.
Check out Extended signature templates
in the File contents and matching specified strings example
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Thank you, for the input!
You can use BigFix Inventory Extended Signature Template option to:
- Search for the file based on the filepath/filename
- Read the file content and parse it to look for the version information line
- Parse the line to extract the version
The Extended Signature creation is flexible and you can make it as restrictive or as simple as needed. Make sure you test the signatures manually using ID:113 Test CIT Signature task to validate the results before publishing the custom catalog entries to the end points
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