Creating a Discovery and Inventory Rule

IT Asset Management (Cloud)

You can use a rule to initiate the remote discovery and inventory process in IT Asset Management. A rule is a combination of one or more targets, an action, and a schedule.

To create a rule:

  1. Make sure that you have created at least one action and one target. (See Creating a Target and Creating an Action)
  2. Go to the Discovery and Inventory Rules page.
    The Discovery and Inventory Rules page lists the existing discovery and inventory rules.
  3. Click Create a rule.
    The Rule Builder appears on the top of your screen.
  4. Click the Targets link on the Rule Builder and select the required targets. Click Add to rule builder button for each target that you need to associate with this rule. You can associate multiple targets with a rule.
  5. Click the Actions link on the Rule Builder and click Add to rule builder button for the action that you need to associate with this rule.
    Important: You can associate only one action with a rule.
  6. Click Schedule and specify the scheduling information for this rule. While specifying the rule execution frequency, make sure that two executions of the same rule do not overlap with each other. This means the recurrence schedule must provide enough time for a rule execution to finish before another execution of the same rule kicks in. For performance reasons, it is recommended that you should not schedule the rule execution in such a way that multiple rules with same underlying beacons run concurrently.
    Important: The discovery and inventory rule execution depends on the Adoption option selected in the underlying rule target and the Inventory agent schedule defined in Discovery and Inventory settings (see IT Asset Management Settings: Inventory Tab). Consider the following rule behavior:
    • If you select Not specified or Do not allow these targets to be adopted in the underlying target definition, the rule runs on its configured schedule and performs all actions as described in the action definition.
    • If you select Allow these targets to be adopted in the underlying target definition, the rule performs actions on Oracle Database, Oracle VM, and VMware according to the rule schedule, but it performs actions on MS SQL, Hyper-V, and hardware inventory according to the inventory-gathering schedule for FlexNet Inventory Agent. For information about this inventory-gathering schedule, see Inventory Agent Schedule.
  7. Click Save As, specify the Rule name and status and click Save.
    You can view the rule execution progress on the Discovery and Inventory Rules page.
    Note:
    • You cannot save a discovery and inventory rule if the Action Type property of the underlying action is set to Discovery and inventory, the selected discovery method is Network scan, and the Define machines to target property of the underlying target is set to a All machines with name like. This is because the rule will not discover anything.
    • After upgrading from a previous version, the rules are preserved and those qualifying the above condition would display a warning message.

IT Asset Management (Cloud)

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