Introduction

Learn how the BigFix Explorer feature extends the power of BigFix.

BigFix Explorer is a new BigFix Platform component, part of the BigFix Platform offering, based on the datastore engine technology implementing it as a stand-alone service.

BigFix Explorer has two main components: datastore engine and the REST APIs.

The datastore engine acts like an in-memory cache that contains the data stored in the BigFix Root Server database. Together with the datastore engine BigFix Explorer offers a REST API interface designed to query the collected data using session relevance. BigFix Explorer must register to a BigFix Root Server and offers near real time data of the BigFix environment any time a BigFix Operator and/or a BigFix Application needs it.

BigFix Explorer can be connected to one BigFix Root Server only.

Multiple instances of BigFix Explorer will be able to connect to the same BigFix Root Server instance. Having more instances helps in failover cases, and when users directly query the BigFix Explorer instead of the BigFix Root Server, different instances might be placed closer to different users instead of having all users query the BigFix Root Server.

In the following figure, you can see the logical architecture of the new component.

The BigFix Client installed is a pre-requisite to install the BigFix Explorer on a machine. A BigFix Explorer instance will connect to the same BigFix Root Server to which the Client is registered.