Introducing Analyses

An Analysis is a collection of property expressions that allow an Operator to view and summarize various properties of BigFix Client computers across a network. The collection is grouped together to be labeled, edited, and activated against groups of computers to allow the results to be displayed together. For example, suppose you have a custom application deployed in your network, and you want to create an analysis to give you important information about the state of your machines relative to that custom application. You might build an analysis with several properties, such as:

• Is the custom application installed?
• What is the version of the custom application?
• Is the application currently running?

With an analysis composed of these properties, operators can activate the analysis against groups of machines to get visibility into the state of the network as it pertains to the custom application.

There are several pre-made Analyses that examine important aspects of your networked computers, including their hardware, applications, and Server/Relay/Client relationships.

Studying these default Analyses can be instructive when you want to make your own or customize existing ones. Custom Analyses can help you monitor aspects of your network that are vital to your company's operation.

The Retrieved Properties that underlie each Analysis are created using Relevance expressions. For example, to make sure you have fully deployed the most recent IBM Endpoint Manager Client software, you might use an expression such as version of client. This simple expression is evaluated on every computer where the analysis is targeted, allowing you to see explicitly which version of the IBM Endpoint Manager Client is running on each computer, or to view a summary of how many machines are running each version.

Analyses are targeted with yet another Relevance statement, which might be as simple as TRUE, which would include all connected Clients. Generally, you want to narrow the scope with a Relevance statement such as name of operating system as lowercase starts with "win", which would limit the Analysis to Windows computers only.