NATURE OF THE AUDITS

General Remarks

The tasks performed by the Synexsys Inventory agent depend on a certain number of parameters. Some of these define the kind of information the agent will gather during the inventory.

Nature of the Audits

The agent can be programmed to gather information on the hardware, the Windows environment, the registry, the ini files, the software and on all the files that are present in the hard disks from the audited workstation. Choosing one or the other option will have the following effect:

Hardware

With this parameter activated, SXSi analyses the PC's hardware. More specifically, this includes the information related to the processor, the memory, the hard disks, and the cards, as well as the data coming from the manufacturer (DMI) such as the PC's serial number, brand, and model. A hardware audit usually takes less then 10 seconds.

   

 

Windows

With this parameter activated, SXSi gathers information on the operating system (OS Type, SP, etc.), the environment (variables, system folders, installed drivers, etc.), on the registry and on specific .INI files. It also retrieves information on the installed software.

   

 

Files

With this parameter activated, SXSi analyses all the files that are present on the hard disks of the audited PC. This type of audit takes more processing time than the previous two, but it does not prevent the user from working normally on his machine during the scan. Auditing all of the files present in a machine can reveal certain malfunctions or non-appropriate practices. Auditing all files allows differentiating easily the installations with official software and non-authorised installations.

   

 

Files audit:
How does it work ?

Synexsys files audits are based on the "Global Files' Reference" which is a file which keeps track of all the files that have been found in your company. Thanks to this Reference, the agent only has to analyse the newly discovered files. This drastically reduces the files audits time and the volumes of data transferred to and processed by the server.

Files audits are performed in three distinct phases:

  1. First, the agent scans all the files on local disks. Only basic information is gathered. This first scan will typically take around 30 seconds.
  2. Then, the agent compares this list of files with the Global Files' Reference.
  3. Finally, the agent runs a detailed files scan but only for the exe, dll and lnk files that were not present in the Global Files' Reference.

Next time a files audit is executed on the same machine, the agent will have practically nothing to do in phase 3. Another advantage is that all the other audited PCs will benefit in the same way from the Global Files' Reference. Because 70 to 80 % of the executable files are found on every PC, in a standard situation, phase 3 will barely take a few seconds after the first 10 or 20 PCs have been audited.

The Global Files' Reference is activated by default. If you want to change this, see the parameters section.

 

Where Are Audits Planned?

If you use the login script method, audits are planned in command line mode, in the users' login script.

If you chose to distribute the Synexsys agent across PCs and running it from Windows, audits are planned from the SXSi Console by selecting the Agent deployment option from the "Tools" menu, or from the context menu of the "Network" sub-section.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last Update: 21.01.2005