Upgrading the FlexNet Inventory Agent

FlexNet Manager Suite 2019 R1 (On-Premises Edition)

Upgrades to your inventory beacon(s) do not trigger any automatic updates to the FlexNet 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 FlexNet inventory agents. This gives you freedom to manage the upgrade of deployed FlexNet inventory agents independently of upgrades to other parts of the system.

Various formats of the inventory gathering tools require different management of upgrades:
  • FlexNet 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. This can be achieved using FlexNet Manager Suite (for details, see Inventory Agent for Automatic Deployment), or by modifying settings stored in the central operations databases (for details, see Specifying the Version for Auto-Updates).
  • If you have chosen to deploy the full FlexNet 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 FlexNet inventory agent, as described below.
  • 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 Inventory Beacons for more details.
  • 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.
  • 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 FlexNet inventory agent using either a third-party tool or manual deployment, see Inventory Agent for Download for details on how to obtain it from the web interface for FlexNet Manager Suite.