BMC Remedyforce Discovery and Client Management Frequently asked questions
1 Table of Contents BMC Remedyforce Discovery and Client Management 4 Overview 4 Remedyforce Agentless Discovery 4 Remedyforce Client Management 4 Frequently asked questions 4 Functionality and Technology Remedyforce Agentless Discovery 4 1. What is Remedyforce Agentless Discovery? 4 2. What are the benefits? 4 3. How does it work? 5 4. Do I need to install anything on my network? 5 5. What is a scanner? 5 6. What is the discovery server? 6 7. How does the scanner work? 6 8. How many scanners do I need to install? 6 9. What credentials are required to scan and inventory a device? 6 10. What is the performance? 6 11. Is there a limit to the number of devices I can scan? 6 12. What is the impact to the network? 6 13. How is it set up in the datacenter? 6 14. Where is the data stored? 6 15. What type of connection is required to trigger an agentless scan? 7 16. What is the security connection between the datacenter and Remedyforce org? 7 17. Where can I find out more detail about the BMC datacenter? 7 Functionality and Technology Remedyforce Client Management 7 18. What is Remedyforce Client Management? 7 19. What are primary the benefits? 7 20. How does it work? 7 21. Is a corporate network connection (ex. VPN) required for remote devices? 8 22. Is it available on premise? 8 23. What is the difference between Premium and Premium Plus? 8 24. What is in Remedyforce Client Management Premium and Premium Plus? 8 25. Is Remedyforce Client Management built on the force.com platform? 8 Functionality and Technology General 9 26. What is the difference between agent and agentless discovery? 9 27. What datacenter is Remedyforce Agentless Discovery and Client Management located? _ 9 28. Do I need Pentaho on premise? 9 29. What is the difference between Remedyforce Client Management and BCM OnDemand? 9 30. How do I avoid duplicate records? 10 31. How does this compare to BMC Discovery (ADDM)? 10 32. Is the data encrypted? 11 34. Does it support proxy gateways? 12 35. Does it support two-factor authentication? 12 36. What are the differences between agentless and agent discovery? 12 37. What ports are used and can I change them? 13 38. How does this work with firewalls? 13 39. Is it scalable? 13
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3 Document Information Version: 3.7 Last Modified on: August 23, 2017 Modified by: John Fulton
4 BMC Remedyforce Discovery and Client Management Overview The identification and management of devices is essential to establish and maintain a successful Service Management program. If an organization is not aware of their environment and devices, they cannot proactively manage those devices. As a result, the organization will struggle and the risks will increase including the IT Department s relevance. For example, the risk of shadow IT will grow resulting in lower customer satisfaction, service levels and first call resolutions. Discovery and client management capabilities provide organizations with critical information and powerful actions (ex. remote control, software delivery, ticket automation, etc ) at their fingertips. Empowering the team to more effectively and efficiently support their organization ultimately increasing first call resolution, improving service levels, reducing support calls and freeing up resources to focus on higher value support activities. Remedyforce Agentless Discovery BMC Remedyforce includes agentless discovery. This new capability is included in the BMC Remedyforce base license at no additional cost. Remedyforce customers now have the ability to natively and intuitively configure and populate the Remedyforce CMDB in just a few easy steps. Remedyforce Client Management Supporting the maturity model approach, Remedyforce customers can expand and mature their discovery and client management capabilities by upgrading to BMC Remedyforce Client Management Premium or Premium Plus. This FAQ answers the most common questions around the Remedyforce discovery and client management capabilities introduced in the Remedyforce Summer 16 release. Frequently asked questions Functionality and Technology Remedyforce Agentless Discovery 1. What is Remedyforce Agentless Discovery? Remedyforce Agentless Discovery is a new capability introduced in the Summer 16 release. This new Remedyforce capability is included in the BMC Remedyforce base license at no additional cost to customers. Remedyforce customers now have the ability to natively and intuitively configure and populate the Remedyforce CMDB in just a few easy steps. Please refer to the additional FAQs below for more detail on this Remedyforce capability. 2. What are the benefits? Visibility with convenience and power. You cannot manage what you do not know. BMC Remedyforce Agentless Discovery empowers organizations to scan, identify and manage devices on the network. With a simple and intuitive interface, setup is quick and easy. Once enabled and configured, your Remedyforce CMDB will be populated with a wealth of device information including hardware configurations and software
5 installations. The benefits of direct access to this information include (1) proactive management by automating discovery to know what is in your environment, (2) empowering the support team, (3) increasing first call resolution rates and (4) reducing support call times. 3. How does it work? There are two primary components and a few steps required to get agentless discovery up and running as documented in the diagram below. The first component, the scanner, is the only on premise component. The scanner performs the agentless scan of your network. The second component is the Remedyforce Discovery Server. The Remedyforce Discovery Server is a hosted component, which collects data from the scanner(s). Through the intuitive enablement and configuration process, the administrator enables their Remedyforce Discovery Server with at least one configured scanner (step 1). Depending on the defined scanner frequency and scope, it will collect the devices, passing the details to the Remedyforce Discovery Server (steps 2 and 3). The final step (step 4) is the passing of discovery data from the Remedyforce Discovery Server to the Remedyforce CMDB. The frequency is based the configuration. 4. Do I need to install anything on my network? Yes, to perform the agentless scanning, at least one scanner must be installed. For more details on scanners, please refer to the next several FAQs. 5. What is a scanner? A scanner is a Windows or Linux device (32 or 64-bit operating system) in your network on which an agent is running. A scanner executes scans on individual devices or groups of devices, via a network target list. The scanner accesses the devices via different network protocols to retrieve various device information. A scanner is the only on premise component required for agentless discovery.
6 6. What is the discovery server? The Remedyforce Discovery Server enables communication among scanners, BMC Remedyforce and discovered devices. The Remedyforce Discovery server stores configurations to discover devices. After discovery, the hardware configuration and software inventory details of discovered devices are stored on this server and passed to the Remedyforce CMDB based upon the frequency defined. 7. How does the scanner work? The scanner uses a variety of protocols (SMB, WMI, SSH, SNMP) to first identify the devices. Once identified, the operating system and hardware configuration details are captured and passed to the Remedyforce Discovery Server. 8. How many scanners do I need to install? Typically, it is one Scanner per physical location, with each scanner located behind your corporate firewall. The scanner will scan 10 devices concurrently, with each initial scan of 10 devices taking approximately 20 seconds. 9. What credentials are required to scan and inventory a device? There are two primary scanning phases. The first phase is an initial scan to identify a device (ex. device name, IP address, device type). No credentials are required to perform this initial scan. The second phase is what we call the inventory scan. This is a deeper scan, pulling more details from the device including hardware configuration and software installed. Customers typically use their domain admin credentials to perform this deeper scan. At a minimum, read-only credentials are required to perform the inventory scan. 10. What is the performance? The amount of concurrent threads is configurable for each scanner. The default is 10 at a time. If you are doing a lightweight discovery, it is very fast (approx. 5 sec/device). If you are performing a full discovery including both Hardware and Software Inventory information, it could take anywhere from 30s to 2m per device. 11. Is there a limit to the number of devices I can scan? Agentless discovery within the base Remedyforce license is limited to 50,000 devices. For customers who require agentless discovery for more than 50,000 devices, please refer to Remedyforce Client Management Premium or Premium Plus below. 12. What is the impact to the network? There is very little impact because the inventory packets are small (approx. 300k). 13. How is it set up in the datacenter? Our BMC cloud-based datacenters will have a uniquely provisioned Remedyforce Discovery server and database instance, both of which are unique to your Remedyforce ORG. The discovery and inventory data from each of your on premise scanners is transmitted via an SSL encrypted network connection directly to your hosted application server where the data is integrated into the discovery and inventory database. This data, once aggregated, will pass into your existing Remedyforce CMDB. 14. Where is the data stored? The discovery and inventory data is stored in either BMC s Chicago or Amsterdam data centers depending on where your Remedyforce org is located. All Remedyforce orgs in
7 the Americas will connect to the Chicago data center, while all other regions (Europe and Asia) will connect to the Amsterdam data center. Once the data is aggregated, a subset (depending on your configuration), will be passed into your existing Remedyforce CMDB. Note: Prior to May 16, 2017, all inventory data was stored in the Amsterdam data center. The Chicago data center was added on this date for the Americas. 15. What type of connection is required to trigger an agentless scan? Just an internet connection is required. No VPN is required. 16. What is the security connection between the datacenter and Remedyforce org? Industry standard PKI encryption technology is implemented to transmit data both from your on premise scanner to your BMC Remedyforce Discovery Server, and again from your hosted discovery server into your Remedyforce CMDB. This encryption technology is based on SSL/TLS encryption standards as detailed in the following IETF documents: RFC 5280 implementation handles the certificate and trust process RFC 5246 implementation handles the encryption and cypher negotiation 17. Where can I find out more detail about the BMC datacenter? To find out more details about the BMC datacenters, select the following link posted on BMC Support Central. Functionality and Technology Remedyforce Client Management 18. What is Remedyforce Client Management? Remedyforce Client Management is an extension of the agentless discovery capabilities provided in the base Remedyforce solution starting with the Summer 16 release. Remedyforce Client Management provides a range of advanced capabilities empowering customers to more efficiently and proactively manage and support their devices. The capabilities include agent discovery, remote management, hardware and software compliance, software normalization, patch management and deployment management. In addition to these capabilities, the solution delivers advanced actions while empowering customers to define rules and actions to ultimately become more proactive and reduce the number of support calls. For example, you can define an advanced action to monitor drive space and either automatically create a ticket when a device hits a certain threshold and/or perform an action (ex. disk cleanup) to free up additional drive space, deferring or eliminating a support call. 19. What are primary the benefits? The benefits include (1) proactive management by automating discovery to know what is in your environment, (2) empowering your support team with a range of tools to be more efficient, (3) increasing first call resolution rates and (4) reducing support call time with quick access to a wealth of information and actions. Please refer to the value statements in the Sales section below for more details. 20. How does it work? The BMC Remedyforce Client Management application server, also known as the Master server, is hosted as a unique instance in a server pool and has a single
8 associated database instance used to store the various data constructs. The Java based BCM administration console and devices under BCM management connect to the application server via its public DNS name. This configuration allows for the administration of any child device that has an active internet connection. In addition, an on premise site relay can be optionally implemented as a local parent for up to 2,000 site clients to reduce the amount of internet traffic generated between the site and the hosted application server. 21. Is a corporate network connection (ex. VPN) required for remote devices? No, just an internet connection is required for remote devices with agents to perform and collect the scan. 22. Is it available on premise? Remedyforce Client Management is a hosted solution and not available on premise. For those who require an on premise discovery and client management solution, BMC Client Management (BCM) OnPremise is the solution to consider. This solution is supported with Remedyforce; however, it does not use the new and improved integration, which leverages web services and requires the installation and configuration of Pentaho. 23. What is the difference between Premium and Premium Plus? Premium contains a subset of Premium Plus features including agent discovery, remote management and compliance management. Please refer to the table below for a more detailed comparison. 24. What is in Remedyforce Client Management Premium and Premium Plus? A summary of the functionality is provided in the table below: Capabilities Remedyforce Base License Remedyforce Client Management Premium Remedyforce Client Management Premium Plus Inventory Management (Agentless Discovery) Inventory Management (Agent Discovery) Remote Management Compliance Management Patch Management Deployment Management 25. Is Remedyforce Client Management built on the force.com platform? No, Remedyforce Agentless Discovery and Client Management is built on the existing and proven technology of BMC Client Management (BCM).
9 Functionality and Technology General 26. What is the difference between agent and agentless discovery? More software inventory is collected with and agent: Hardware discovery is the same with or without an agent installed. Software discovery is limited to WMI installed applications without an agent installed. With an agent you also have security inventory (antivirus, firewall), custom inventory, connectivity inventory (link between routers, switches, and devices), power management inventory (green IT, when your screen is locked), patch inventory (installed/missing patches, service packs) 27. What datacenter is Remedyforce Agentless Discovery and Client Management located? We support both the Amsterdam and Chicago datacenters. All Remedyforce orgs in the Americas will connect to the Chicago datacenter, while all other regions will connect to the Amsterdam datacenter. To find out more details about the datacenters, select the following link. 28. Do I need Pentaho on premise? No, the Remedyforce Agentless Discovery and Client Management capabilities leverage web services displacing the need for customers to install and configure Pentaho on premise. Note: If a customer needs to modify the mappings, then the older integration should be considered; however, few, if any, customers have required modification of the mappings. We are considering a future enhancement with the new integration to provide an option for configurable mappings. 29. What is the difference between Remedyforce Client Management and BCM OnDemand? The underlying technology is BMC Client Management and the end user interaction and capabilities are the same, but the integration is different (ex. Remedyforce Client Management uses APIs vs. the older integration to BCM uses Pentaho). In addition, Remedyforce Client Management automates the provisioning of a hosted servers vs. BCM OnDemand, which requires a more manual provisioning process. Below is a summary of the primary differences: Capabilities Simplified Setup with Automated Server Provisioning Requires Pentaho Configurable Mapping Capabilities Embedded Administration Remedyforce Client Management Premium and Premium Plus BMC Client Management
10 Offering SaaS SaaS and On Premise Positioning Remedyforce Capabilities Remedyforce Integration 30. How do I avoid duplicate records? We recommend you enable and configure CMDB Reconciliation, which is a configurable, rule-based engine to define your own rules for uniqueness by class. If you don t enable and configure CMDB Reconciliation, the Assembly ID field determines uniqueness. This is a system-generated value from the discovery source. As a result, there is a risk of duplicate values when are also importing records from other sources (such as other discovery tools, manual entry, procurement feeds, advanced ship notices) because these sources do not share the same unique value. If you choose not to enable and configure CMDB Reconciliation, to avoid the risk of duplicate records with Remedyforce discovery, ensure the following with your discovered records: The records do not already exist in your Remedyforce CMDB. They will not be discovered and imported from other discovery sources. These same records will not be manually created. If any of these conditions exist and have occurred, you will need to analyze and clean up your data to remove duplicate records. 31. How does this compare to BMC Discovery (ADDM)? Both solutions provide agentless discovery; however, BMC Remedyforce Client Management provides a number of capabilities around software identification, metering and compliance, while BMC Discovery s focus is on the datacenter, providing more indepth discovery for specific datacenter environments. Below is a table highlighting the differences:
11 Function Remedyforce Client Management BMC Discovery (ADDM) Agentless Discovery Device Scan for installed software Discovery of Hardware Details, such as memory, processor, BIOS info Discovery of Operating System and Details Discovery of Network Interface MAC Addresses Scheduled Discovery Scans Discovery of Load Balancer Devices Agent-based Discovery Software Catalog (Desktop Software) Software License Management Software Metering Software Prohibiting Ability to create and manage dynamic device groups Ability to dynamically discover AD computers Cluster Discovery Deep Discovery of Application Details such as Websites and Internal Databases Discovery of Fiber Channel HBA Cards Discovery of Host Containers, Blade Enclosure Discovery of Listening Ports Discovery of Load Balancer Services, Pools, Members, and Instances Discovery of Observed Communication between Devices Extended Discovery to Perform additional commands and read configuration files Network Device Port and Speed Mismatch Port Speed and Duplex information for all Network Interfaces Software Catalog (Enterprise Server Software) Data Provenance for Ready Data Validation Business Application Modeling File System to Storage Volume Relationships Host to Load Balancer Relationships Server to Cluster Relationships Server to Server Dependency Relationships Server to Storage Dependency Relationships Software to Software Communication Relationships Automatic Network Device Computer Relationships Virtual Host to Guest Relationships 32. Is the data encrypted? 33. Passwords are encrypted along with the data as it uses HTTPS when transferred.
12 34. Does it support proxy gateways? We do not support proxy gateways. For Discovery, firewalls can be configured for the scanner access to be restricted to the OnDemand server/port. For compliance and patch management (Premium and Premium Plus offerings), more access is needed to download updates from BMC and vendors. These do support proxy gateways. 35. Does it support two-factor authentication? Two-factor authentication is not applicable in this architecture as the passing of data is automated. Two-factor authentication implies human intervention is involved. If security is concern, please refer to the other FAQs which detail the secure approach. 36. What are the differences between agentless and agent discovery? As the name implies, agentless discovery does not require an agent on each device. Both discover device details. Agent discovery provides a number of additional capabilities beyond discovery, which are documented in the table below: Actions Agentless Discovery Agent Discovery Device Discovery Audit Now Remote Management Compliance Management Software Normalization Patch Management Deployment Management File Transfer Reboot Shut Down Wake Up Access to Device Details Agentless Discovery Agent Discovery File System Registry Windows Events Processes Services From a data perspective, they are very similar. Hardware discovery is the same with or without an agent installed. When it comes to discovery of software, there are some differences. The primary benefit of an agent is that it will leverage a software catalog to normalize, standardize and classify the software.
13 37. What ports are used and can I change them? The hosted application server will use a range of 10 TCP allocated during the server provisioning process. The hosted application server port ranges are static and cannot be altered. 38. How does this work with firewalls? An on premise device behind an unmanaged firewall that can connect to a public internet IP address and port will create a managed network tunnel used by only the client executable. The client maintained network tunnel allows for bi-directional traffic between the on premise client and the public facing hosted application server. 39. Is it scalable? Yes, very scalable. BMC Remedyforce Client Management can manage in excess of several hundred thousand client workstations. The hosted application server (aka Master Server) can manage up to 5,000 simultaneous client connections. Each client can be either a standalone workstation or a dedicated on premise site relay. Each site relay can manage up to 2,000 client workstations using a parent child hierarchy such as the image depicted below: If you have any questions regarding the solution or content, please contact John Fulton (john_fulton@bmc.com) or Serena Lambiase (serena_lambiase@bmc.com).
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