FlexNet Inventory Scanner: Operation on Windows

IT Asset Management (Cloud)

This description assumes that you have obtained and appropriately deployed the FlexNet Inventory Scanner to working locations (see FlexNet Inventory Scanner: Implementation on Windows).

The FlexNet Inventory Scanner may be invoked through a command line (details are available in ndtrack Command Line), through a scheduled task (although this is not generally recommended), or simply by double-clicking the executable file while you are logged on using an account with suitable administrator privileges.

At each invocation, the self-installing executable:

1. Installs the Windows version of the tracker (or inventory collection) executable (ndtrack.exe) and related control files in the temp directory of the account that is executing it.
2. Executes ndtrack, either according to the command-line options supplied, or using its default parameters. This means that the tracker component runs as the same account that executed the FlexNet Inventory Scanner.
   Running as the LocalSystem account is recommended, because elevated privileges are required to complete several aspects of inventory gathering. It is possible to run the tracker under a non-LocalSystem account, but best practice is to run it with administrator privileges, or you may lose inventory functionality.

   Note: On Microsoft Windows, the tracker does not prevent invocation by an account that has lesser privileges; but you would then need to ensure that such an account had all the required access rights for the kinds of inventory you expected to gather on a target device. Since this is highly dependent on your environment, this approach is unsupported.

   When no command-line options are supplied, the default behaviors are:

   • The tracker gathers a machine inventory on the local computer on which it is currently running.
   • It saves this inventory in %temp%\FlexeraSoftware\$(UserName) on $(MachineId).ndi, where %temp% is the temporary directory for the account that is running the FlexNet Inventory Scanner, with the file name showing the account and machine ID related to the inventory run.
   • Returns an exit code of 0 for success. (For any other exit code, check the log file.)
   • Records the log for this activity in %temp%\ManageSoft\tracker.log.
   • If InventorySettings.xml is supplied and ndtrack can connect to the Oracle Database, returns a separate .ndi Oracle inventory file. (Details about InventorySettings.xml are included in FlexNet Inventory Scanner: Implementation on Windows. For details of account setup for gathering Oracle inventory, see Credentials for FlexNet Inventory Scanner Inventory in IT Asset Management System Reference.)
   • If the Oracle Net Listener can be found and queried, returns a discovery file with details of the Oracle listener.

   These behaviors can be modified with command-line options for ndtrack, attached to the command line for FlexNet Inventory Scanner (which passes them directly through to ndtrack). For example, you can configure the FlexNet Inventory Scanner to trigger an immediate upload to an inventory beacon of your choice for integration into the standard inventory processes. For details of these command-line options, see ndtrack Command Line.
3. When execution is completed, FlexNet Inventory Scanner uninstalls the ndtrack executable, leaving only the self-installing executable FlexNet Inventory Scanner.exe in place.