Upgrading the Inventory Agent

Upgrades to your inventory beacon(s) do not trigger any automatic updates to the Inventory Agents that you have deployed on target machines for local inventory collection. Even when there is an update to the central application server, this does not automatically upgrade Inventory Agents. This gives you freedom to manage the upgrade of deployed Inventory Agents independently of upgrades to other parts of the system.

Various formats of the inventory gathering tools require different management of upgrades:

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Inventory Agents installed locally on inventory targets (either through 'adoption' or third-party deployment), and collecting agent policy from an inventory beacon, can self-update automatically, once you specify the permitted version. You can manage different versions for different platforms, or even limit updates to a specific target set of devices. Manage self-updates in the Inventory agent for automatic deployment section of the Inventory Settings page (Data Collection > IT Assets Inventory Tasks > Inventory Settings), and see Inventory Agent for Automatic Deployment for details).

Tip:This inventory setting grants permission (through policy) to the Inventory Agents to perform self- upgrades or downgrades to the specified version. The setting, therefore, can only be put into effect on those platforms where the Inventory Agent includes self-update functionality. Currently, Inventory Agents on Debian or Ubuntu Linux do not include self-update functionality. On these platforms, you can do any of:

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Deploy new versions of Inventory Agent manually

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Use your preferred third-party deployment tool to publish updates to Inventory Agents

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Uninstall the old version(s) of Inventory Agent, and once again target the devices for adoption through IT Asset Management.

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If you have chosen to deploy the full Inventory Agent to some location where it cannot be updated by policy, you can distribute new versions using your preferred mechanism. All you need first is to collect the required version(s) of Inventory Agent, as described below.

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Copies of the FlexNet inventory core components installed on inventory beacons and used for Zero-footprint inventory collection are updated as part of the FlexNet Beacon self-update. You do not need any further controls for this process (other than those applying to the FlexNet Beacon update). Refer back to Upgrading IT Asset Management Inventory Beacons for more details.

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If you are using copies of the lightweight FlexNet Inventory Scanner, you need to update those copies using the same techniques by which you deployed it in the first place.

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If you have used other techniques to deploy the FlexNet inventory core components to file shares or other locations of your choosing (where they are not collecting agent policy automatically), you need to use your preferred technique for deploying updated components.

If you wish to deploy a current version of the Inventory Agent using either a third-party tool or manual deployment, see Inventory Agent for Download for details on how to obtain it from Flexera One.