We are getting millions of data every week to our BigFix server. We need to show that data in BigFix dashboards. How we can store this data? shall we store this data to external database? Anyone has used external database with BigFix integration?
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Since you don’t want to query the BES database unless you’re using the supplied API’s, there is nothing wrong with exporting the database each day to your DB team to manipulate how they like. We used to do that.
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Thanks Alexa.
We are not exporting BES database to external database. We will keep Bigfix data in BES database only. Our malware related data which we are getting from external API, for that we are planning to store in external database.
Does it make sense?
Also which external database will be good to integrate with BigFix. We are looking for lightweight, optimised database in our scenarios. It should be good to handle few millions of records at a time.
Please suggest.
No, that doesn’t make sense (at least to me). Performing a database export is quick, easy, safe, and posses no performance hit on the BES database. Your DB team can then query the exported database all they want with zero risk and data will never be more than one day old.
Why should i do Database export for BES? i will be still using BES database for BigFix data. I want to store only malware related data which i am getting form external API and that is huge.
My question is shall I use existing BigFix database to store that information or I should use some external database to store malware related data which i am pulling from external API.
@shaishav.shah, I’ve been a BigFix user since ~2003, the Developers have always been VERY clear about this. you do NOT want to try and insert data directly into the BF Enterprise database. While you might be able to get away with making it work for a short time, as soon as you upgrade the database, you will likely lose your “extra data”, and there is no guarantee you won’t adversely impact the performance of the server in the mean time. I also suspect you would have difficulty receiving efficient support from IBM if you modified the BF Enterprise database directly in any way.
@AlexaVonTess is correct, if you don’t want to use either the REST or SOAP API’s, then you should make a copy of the database if you plan to access it directly.
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I understand.
Here we are not planning to access BES database directly. Only we are making our custom python code, from which we will call REST API to get vulnerability/malware data from our client machine and we will insert that in external database (Cassandra/Couch/Mongo DB). For displaying in visualisation, we will access data from external database and will display in BigFix dashboards/web reports.
Here, we are planning to use any one from below DB.
Cassandra
CouchDB
MongoDb.
Is there any issues while accessing this external DB with IBM BigFix?
I don’t think you can use WebReports to access external databases. Unless you were to really get our custom html on to do it… that would be interesting. Maybe you could have a js run an external rest query to import the data in. That might be possible with WebReports.
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