Insight - Asset Management & Discovery Agent

[Justin Knupp]

We are currently evaluating the Insight plugin for our asset management and the Insight-Discovery tool to go with it.

We are liking Insight a lot, but have run into an issue and I have a question about how the Discovery tool/agents/process works.

We currently run all of our Jira stuff on a Linux box (our server architecture is 95% Linux), but we run primarily a Windows environment for our users.  We have about 300 Windows machines that we would like to get into Insight via auto discovery (of some sort) and not have to type each one in by hand.

So with our situation, Jira hosted on a Linux box, are we even able to use the Insight-Discovery tool?  Or are we out of luck?

I get that the Insight-Discovery tool probably won't work for us (due to the requirement of Jira on a Windows box to use the WMI stuff), but what about the local agent? 

We are open to pushing out an agent to all of our Windows machines, but, will it communicate with our Jira Server (again Linux box) to write/report the data?

So I guess my question is, will the agent work for us, or is Insight (as a platform) just not an option for us seeing as the whole auto discovery thing is a "must have" for us.

Let me know if this doesn't make sense.

Thanks in advance for any help/thoughts/experiences.

-Justin

[Christian_Solle · Accepted solution]

Hi Justin,

let me try to give you some answers.

You don't have to run Jira on a Windows machine to use the Discovery Tool.

The Discovery Tool is a separate software that can runs on a Windows system.

Since version 2.2.0 it is also possible to use it on a Linux Server (without WMI)

And the Windows Agent only collect the local data

The Discovery Tool will collect the results and transport them to your Jira/Insight server.

So in your situation:

You can use the Windows Agents on the Windows System 

Using a Discovery Instance on a Linux system to collect the data from the Windows-Agents and collect the data from your linux servers.

And you can use many instances of the Discovery Tool for separate networks.

Hopefully our documentation can answer also a lot of your questions.

Let me know if you have additional questions.

// Christian

[Chester Small]

HI Christian,

Thank you very much for the (fast) reply.  Really appreciate it.

This helps a bunch!  It sounds like this might work really well for us (which would be great as we've been really impressed with the Insight tool).

The lack of WMI isn't a huge deal for us.  Sure, it would be nice, but there are advantages for us in using the local agent. So that would work just fine.

The key was the ability of the Discovery instance to push the data back to our Jira/Insight server.  That's perfect.

We'd looked through the documentation and were still a bit confused.  A suggestion, for the documentation, a couple different graphics of potential scenarios I think would be great and go a long way to help people understand how to deploy the tool.  Again, just a suggestion.

I'll have our people get in touch to get a trial of the Discovery tool so we can give this a spin.

Again, thanks a bunch for the reply.

Have a great day.

-Justin

[Christian_Solle]

Yes your are right.

We also saw that the graphics could be better.

The problem is, there are so many possible situation

to use it (also with the collector).

We will try to create some better graphics :)