Hardware and Software Inventory

Hardware and Software Inventory is the foundation on which all other system management capabilities of Alloy Discovery and Alloy Navigator are built. Alloy Discovery’s audit agents examine the state of a company's hardware and software environment and collect various information about hardware components, operating system configurations, installed software, network configurations, etc., and collect all that information in the form of audit snapshots.

Network Nodes

Network Node (or Node) is a piece of equipment which may operate on a network. There are three types of network nodes: computers, Chromebooks, network devices. Alloy Discovery uses different audit methods to identify and collect inventory information on all types of network nodes.

Computers can be physical computers, virtual machines, and hypervisors.

Hypervisors

A hypervisor, also called virtual machine manager (VMM), is a hardware virtualization technique, usually a special software environment, that allows multiple operating systems, called guests or virtual machines, to run concurrently on a host machine. It manages the host's processor, memory, and other resources allocated to each operating system. Hypervisors are frequently installed on server hardware to host virtual machines that themselves act as servers.

Alloy Discovery can identify multiple types of hypervisors and enables you to audit their guest virtual environments (as regular computers), as well as host virtual environments.

INFO: For details on supported hypervisors, see Installation Guide: Alloy Discovery Audit Clients.

For supported virtualization platforms, Alloy Discovery also automatically associates virtual guest environments with their host hypervisors. Virtual machines hosted on other virtualization platforms are also identified, however cannot be automatically associated with their host. If needed, the association can be established manually.

Inventory Information

Inventory information is audit data collected on different types of network nodes. Inventory information collected on computers and Chromebooks is stored in the audit snapshots.

Audit Snapshots

Audit snapshots are the end result of your audit. An audit snapshot contains up-to-the-minute hardware and software details of the audited computer or inventory information of the audited Chromebook. Depending on audit settings, a snapshot consists of the following files:

• ADT — An .adt snapshot file is always created during the audit of a computer. The .adt file contains hardware inventory data and information about installed software. Information in .adt files is organized in sections with a set of audit attributes in each.

• SCN — If you configure Alloy Discovery to scan drives for files, an .scn file is also created during the audit of a computer. Information in .scn files is organized in two sections. The first section contains the detailed portion of the file scan results, i.e. file size, date, location, version, and other properties of individual files that match the search mask. The second section of the .scn file contains the summary of the file scan results, i.e. volume statistics for all files that match the search mask, broken down by folder location.

• ADTX — An .adtx snapshot file is created during the audit of a Chromebook. The .adtx file contains inventory data loaded from the Google Admin console.

After the Inventory Analyzer has collected snapshots and/or the Inventory Server has exported audit data from the Google Admin Console, the Inventory Server imports snapshots into the Alloy Discovery database. You can view snapshot information in the Alloy Discovery Desktop App or in the standalone Audit Snapshot Viewer.