Agentless Audits

Agentless audits can be used where it is not feasible to install a client agent, for example on a mission critical server. Agentless auditing allows you to audit a computer and collect its inventory data without deploying an agent to that computer. Agentless audits use the Microsoft Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) infrastructure to gather information.

For auditing software licenses running remotely on thin clients, see Auditing Virtual Machines.

Make sure that the gateway has administrator rights and permissions on the remote machines. You have to be granted the right to act as part of the operating system under the target machine's local security policy. WMI must be allowed on the target computer.

Following are the tasks of the Agentless Audit feature:

Running an Agentless Audit

You can only run an agentless audit on Windows computers. They are not supported on UNIX, LINUX, or Mac OS computers.

1.Log in to Neurons for ITSM.

2.Open the Gateway workspace.

3.Click Scan Active Directory. This ensures that all unaudited computers (those without a client agent installed) are listed.

4.Click the Configuration Item tab, and select one or more devices to audit.

The Agent Status column should not read installed and the IP Address field should be populated.

5.Click the Remote Scan quick action from the toolbar or go to the action menu and select Audit > Scan Remotely. This quick action is only available for the following types of configuration items: Server, VirtualServer, VirtualWorkstation, Workstation, and Computer.

This creates a task for the gateway for a WMI-based audit, which must be picked up and processed (up to 30 minutes delay). When the audit has finished, any changes since the last audit are recorded. If there are no changes since the last audit, no additional information is recorded.

You can continue to work while the audit is being processed.

6.To check the progress of the audit, select the Agent Task tab.

7.Search for the machine name. You see the text "Remote Scan of machine name". The initial status is pending, which advances to in progress and then complete.

8.Go back to the computer record and view the updated information.

Scheduling an Agentless Audit

1.Log in to the Neurons for ITSM.

2.Open the Configuration Item workspace.

3.Select the computer for which to specify an audit schedule. The Agent Status column should not read installed.

4.From the action menu, choose Audit, then Set Daily Agentless Scan or Set Weekly Agentless Scan.

The scan interval you specify is shown in the Agentless Scan Interval field on the Details tab of the record.

5.To set the time when the daily or weekly scan runs, click the and select More > Schedule Entry.

Two default schedules called Daily Agentless Scan and Weekly Agentless Scan are listed.

6.Depending on your selected scan interval, select either the daily record or the weekly record.

7.Specify the start time and end time, the recurrence, and the start time and end time or select No End Date.

8.Click Save to set up your scan schedule.

For more information, see Fields Collected by Agent and Agentless Scans.