Client Management Suite

Hi, We have a production enviornment for Altiris CMS 7.1 as follows: - 1 NS - 4 Site Servers - 800 agents This has been running for about a year now and 700 out of the 800 agents have been added in the last 5 months. We have noticed a huge increment in the Network Data usage which is now reflected on the bill received from our ISP: FROM OUR NETWORK TO CLIENT MACHINES - Without Altiris running we use an average constant rate of 800kbps - With Altiris running we use an average constant rate of 1.5Mbs FROM CLIENT MACHINES TO OUR NETWORK - Without Altiris running we use an average constant rate of 780kbps - With Altiris running we use an average constant rate of 670kbps The question is, how can I control this data usage from Altiris point of view? what NS task would be constantly sending traffic to the client machines causing the data usage to be duplicate? Reommendations on how to improve data usage? I have made some configuration serever as follows: - Destop Computers: * Download new configuration every 1 day * Upload basic inventory every 1 week However, it doesn't seem to improve at all. I appreciate any inputs

In Settings > Agents/Plugins > Targeted agent settings  You can set up throttling to limit how much bandwidth is being used.  You can create seperate policies to manage clients, different groups of clients, and site servers.  the only problem I have with this is the clients or site servers will still be transmitting the same amount of information, itll just be slower and more spread out.

The second thing I did for my WAN links, which seems to have had a greater affect, was to create a package server at each remote site.  I designated regular workstations as site servers and only installed the package service.  If the site already had a task and package server, the 2nd package server I marked as constrained.  Constrained servers can only download from unconstratined servers and must be on the same site.  One thing to keep in mind is when you upload/import a new image, it will try to push the image to all package servers.  You'll have to go in to Settings > Disk Images and modify the package servers that will store the image.  Package servers without task service cannot deploy images and the package will be marked as invalid on that system.

Limit your inventory policies to conserve bandwidth as well.

Thanks for that, I appreciate your suggestions.

I understand I can use throttling for Distributions (downloads) and the idea for Disk images makes a lot of sense.

However, I haven't deployed any Softwrae Distribution or Disk Image recently and the Network data usage is still the same. There must be some task(s) that is continuosly running and generating big amounts of traffic but I haven't been able to identify.

As far as I understand the inventory is only sent when something changed and base on my configuration it should only run once a day for Basic Inventory and once a week for Full Inventory.

 

 

By inventory I meant the Hardware and software inventory policies.

 

Manage > Policies > Discovery And Inventroy > Inventory

 

 Check to make sure these arent running too often and you can also change the advanced settings for bandwidth management:

 

Windows

 

Throttle inventory reporting evenly over a period of: hours

24 hours may be a bit extreme but 6 should do it, and make sure your schedule is set for off hours / "weekends".