Collecting supplementary data

The Help menu in BigFix Inventory UI has an option, Supplementary Data Collection, which allows you to collect all data harvested by the tool (using the fixlet) on endpoints and create a single compressed file with results.

Figure 1. Help menu to access the Supplementary Data Collection option
Figure 2. 'Supplementary Data Collection' option

'Supplementary Data Collection' features

Software Data Harvesting Tool Data Collection​ has the following features:

  • queries all currently configured non-disconnected datasources for uploaded scan files matching Harvesting tool package name (directly BigFix database)​
  • downloads the packages only for computers which are present (imported) in BigFix Inventory
  • creates a single compressed file containing all downloaded packages and status.txt file and serves it as an attachment​

The sum of sizes of downloaded files does not exceed allHarvestedDataFilesSizeLimit megabytes (hidden advanced server settings, 512 MB by default).​ The action is accessible for BigFix Inventory administrators and only one data collection can run at the same time. If the same user or another user tries to download while collection is still running, the below error message, "The request is still in progress or it has been initiated by another user. Wait until it is complete." appears. Closing the "Software Data Harvesting Tool Data Collection" dialog box cancels any running collection triggered by the current user.​ Invalid datasources/files are skipped and maximum files are collected (until the limit or all if the limit is 0).​ If any of statistics from status.txt is non-zero, a warning, Some files could not be retrieved. check tema.log for details. appears.

Package content

The package is generated in HarvestedData_<timestamp>.zip format.

Software Data Harvesting Tool Data Collection summary

  • Number of datasources with connectivity problems
  • Number of datasources skipped because of file size limit
  • Number of datasources with other errors
  • Number of files skipped in the last datasource because of file size limit.
  • Number of files which could not be downloaded
  • Number of files with invalid paths
  • Number of computers that did not match with BigFix Inventory database
Note: Computer IDs in file names are from BigFix Inventory database and the IDs are appended to the original harvested data package names from endpoints.​

If any of statistics from status.txt is non-zero, the "Some files could not be retrieved. Check tema.log for details." warning appears.