Symantec Management Platform (Notification Server)

Hello,

We have a couple of "active" assets that had the agent manually removed.  When looking at the console through Manage Computers, Altiris displays the machine as having an agent installed.  The machine no longer has has an agent.  How can we get Altiris to properly display the machine in the console as Not Having An Agent (Unmanaged). 

Thanks,

If you don't need the history of those machines and if they are in AD, you could simply delete them from the console and run an AD import after that. They will show up as unmanaged after the import.

We do need to keep the history of the machines.  The only way I see to make this happen is too temporarily set the machine to "retired" status and then set it back to "active" the next day.

The "retired" status will tell SMP this is no longer a managed machine without removing the history.  Setting it back to "active" the next day will give AMS the proper value it needs for reporting as an active, but unmanaged machine.

Is this approach correct or is there a more logical approach?

Is my logic correct?

We do need to keep the history of the machines. The only way I see to make this happen is too temporarily set the machine to "retired" status and then set it back to "active" the next day.

The "retired" status will tell SMP this is no longer a managed machine without removing the history. Setting it back to "active" the next day will give AMS the proper value it needs for reporting as an active, but unmanaged machine.

Is this approach correct or is there a more logical approach?

Hello PeeGee,

Is my logic correct?

We do need to keep the history of the machines. The only way I see to make this happen is too temporarily set the machine to "retired" status and then set it back to "active" the next day.

The "retired" status will tell SMP this is no longer a managed machine without removing the history. Setting it back to "active" the next day will give AMS the proper value it needs for reporting as an active, but unmanaged machine.

Is this approach correct or is there a more logical approach?

You really need this answer, right? ;)

Setting the status to Retired and back to Active will not change the "is managed" flag. Looking at the DB, the "is managed" item seems to be an association, anyway, it can be modified directly via SQL.

If you change the status to Retired, your inventory information MIGHT get purged, but that depends on your CMDB configuration. Look at the Task in > Manage > Jobs and Tasks > System Jobs and Tasks > Service and Asset Management  > CMDB  > Inventory Cleanup

Usually I set this up to purge the inventory nightly. In general it's suggested to turn this on, as it will save you licenses of retired computers.

This being said, I'd like to understand why you only want to change the "is managed" flag but keep inventory data and the machine active. This has different effects:

1. Active machines are members of all filters, thus you have additional processing time to update them
2. You keep on consuming licenses for the different solutions

 

For customers who have asset and CMDB, we usually setup an "internal" connector which takes the data which is needed to be kept from inventory data classes and write those to Asset/CMDB custom data classes and a weekly schedule.
This way, we have all the data we need for future use in the asset information and can change the status to "retired". That will clean out inventory data and release the license, but our "most important" data keeps on residing in the CMDB, as it's in custom data classes.

Thank you, PeeGee.

I follow everything you listed with the exception of:  "Setting the status to Retired and back to Active will not change the "is managed" flag".  (Within the console, it appears to be changing the "is managed" flag or at least the icon as explained below).

When viewing Manage > Computers, you see a list of all the computers in the system.  The ones that have a yellow icon are managed.  The ones that don't have a yellow icon are not managed.  The ones that don't have the yellow icon are not consuming an agent licenses. 

Some machines in our evironment accidently recieved an agent when the system was first rolled out.  Our Desktop group has connected to the machines and removed the agent manually.   However, SMP still thinks the computer should be managed as indicated by the presence of the yellow icon.  This is creating some confusion.   The bigger problem is that they are consuming an agent license and throw off our "inventory not collected in the last 30 days" report.

By setting the machine temporarily to "retired", SMP appears to release the license.  The machine is not really retired and is still part of our environment and must be tracked, but NOT managed by Altiris with an agent.  That is why we come back and set the status back to Active.  This seems to be the only way to tell SMP to release the agent license.

I hope this is a clear explaination of our situation.  I would greatly appreciate your feedback on how we are going about correcting this.  If there is a better alternative or practice, please do advise.

Hi WK01,

if the "retired" state fixes this issue for you, just go ahead and use this solution.

Anyway in my environment the retired state does not clean the "is managed" flag. BTW: I have not been looking at the icons in the console, but at the SQL instead. You could check, if this behaves also on the DB level as expected:

In SQL run

select * from vcomputer

against the Symantec_CMDB database and check the "is_managed" column.