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Configuring
After you install BigFix Inventory, configure the application. Create accounts for the users who need access to the application and set up scans to collect software and hardware inventory data from your environment.
Performing optional configuration
You can perform optional configuration tasks to further customize the application.
Data retention periods

Configuring
After you install BigFix Inventory, configure the application. Create accounts for the users who need access to the application and set up scans to collect software and hardware inventory data from your environment.
- Creating users and groups
  Each user who has access to BigFix Inventory must be assigned a role and a computer group. The role defines which reports and panels the user can view. The computer group narrows down the scope of these reports and panels to computers that meet certain criteria.
- Setting up scans to discover software and hardware inventory
  The scanner is an independent, well-defined component that is used by BigFix Inventory. It is installed and managed through the BigFix client, and it enables the software and capacity scans. Software and capacity scans collect data that is later on displayed on the BigFix Inventory reports. For environments with up to a few thousand computers, you can enable the default scan configuration. In this case, the analyses are activated and software and capacity scans as well as uploads of their results are scheduled automatically on the computers that are subscribed to the BigFix Inventory site. For larger environments, it is advisable to divide the computers into groups and manually configure a separate scan schedule for each group to avoid performance issues.
- Performing optional configuration
  You can perform optional configuration tasks to further customize the application.
  - Data retention periods
    - Configuring data retention period for raw utilization data
      By default, raw data about utilization of license metrics is stored in the BigFix Inventory database for 90 days. You can change the period depending on the period for which you want to generate reports of raw utilization data.
  - Setting up computer properties
    You can specify computer properties that are to be gathered from the computers in your infrastructure. You can then use those properties to filter data on the Computers report and to assign computers to computer groups.
  - Deprecated: Disabling subcapacity calculations
    Subcapacity licenses are based on the number of processor value units (PVU) or resource value units (RVU) that can be used by the product not the number of all processor cores that are available on the physical server. Such a licensing scheme allows for reducing the cost of licenses for products that are eligible for PVU or RVU subcapacity. If no subcapacity products are installed in your environment, you can disable subcapacity calculations to improve the performance of the import.
  - Setting the home page
    If you use a particular report or panel frequently, you can set it as BigFix Inventory home page.
- Classifying the BigFix client used by multiple BigFix products
  BigFix client is a component that is common for all products from the BigFix family. If you have a number of BigFix products installed, the client must be classified as used by these products. Because the client is usually installed on all computers in the enterprise, its manual classification can be time-consuming. To reduce the amount of time and resources that are needed to perform this task, you can generate license tags. The tags mark the client as used by the BigFix products that are installed in your infrastructure. The information is later on reflected in BigFix Inventory without the need of manual classification.

Data retention periods

Table 1. Data retention periods
Type of data	Period for which the data is retained	Changing the default period
Raw scan data: results of the file system scan, package data scan, and application usage statistics scan	7 days	To change the default period, change the value of the raw_data_api_history_keep_days parameter on the Advanced Server Settings panel. For more information, see: Advanced server settings.
Raw utilization data that is displayed on the Resource Utilization report	90 days	To change the default period, go to the Server Settings panel and change the value in the Retention Period section. For more information, see: Configuring data retention period for raw utilization data.
Data that is needed to calculate utilization of license metrics that is displayed on the All Metrics report	Always	The period cannot be changed.
Data about an old complex signature that is substituted with a new complex signature	Until the software is detected based on the new signature	The period cannot be changed.