Configuring Asset Management › Collect Tasks › Hardware Inventory › How the Asset Management Agent Collects Hardware Inventory

How the Asset Management Agent Collects Hardware Inventory

To configure and schedule hardware inventory, you must first understand the actions taken by the asset management agent to collect the inventory from the agent computers. Understanding this process will help you to troubleshoot the inventory collection process, and also schedule hardware inventory based on how often you want to collect the inventory and the impact of collecting the inventory at such intervals.

The agent performs the following actions to collect the hardware inventory:

• At the scheduled time, the agent executes each collect task configured for the asset.
• Runs the appropriate executable for collecting the information under each detection module and saves it in a specific file, for example, the general inventory information is saved as ig40.inv on the agent.
• Saves the full scan files and compares these files with the previous files. It then sends the delta values to the scalability server. It does not store the delta values locally. The information sent to the scalability server is stored as i## file and if previous delta values have not been collected, the version number of the file is incremented like i01, i02, and so on. For more information on how the delta values are collected, see the Collecting Delta Values section explained below.
• The agent first saves this file in the Agent Working Directory and then puts it in the scalability server's collect area (...\ServerDB\Sector\Collect or …/Server/Sector/COLLECT in case of Linux/UNIX platforms). The agent repeats this step every time it collects the data.

  Note: If the agent runs more than once before the engine collects the data, it creates an inventory file for each run. For example, the general inventory information will be collected with the extension i01, i02 and so on. So, 24 files will be created starting from i00 to i23.

• When the engine triggers the engine collect task, it collects all the files from the scalability server, processes them, and stores the content in the database. Once processed, the engine deletes the files from the scalability server's collect area.
• New or modified inventory module configurations, including their scheduling settings, are updated on the scalability server through the collect task. The agent accepts the new or updated inventory information.

Three objects are involved in this process—agent, collect task, and engine collect task. Each of these objects has independent scheduling options. When the scheduling for any of these objects differs, you should consider the following:

• The execution of the collect task depends on the agent's run.
• Collect tasks have their own scheduling options. By default, tasks are scheduled to run always.
• The update to the database depends on the scheduling of the engine collect task.

The following example explains this scenario. The following scheduling options are specified for the three objects:

• Agent - every one hour
• Inventory collect task - Always run Job
• Engine collect task - Once a day

In this case, the agent runs after every one hour and immediately executes the collect task. However, the engine can collect the information only once a day. So, the database is updated only once a day though the agent collects the information 24 times a day. Note that this is an undesirable scenario. To have an optimum implementation, you can schedule the collect task and engine collect task to execute at the same time. This ensures that all the collected data is updated in the database.