Managing Inventory Servers

Updated in 2021.1

Alloy Inventory Server is a Windows service that runs all automated tasks and scheduled events in Alloy Discovery. This article describes what tasks Inventory Server performs and informs how to manage your server, or servers.

NOTE: Alloy Inventory Server requires a significant amount of system resources. When your organization has more than 500 computers to audit, we recommend that you install the Inventory Server on a dedicated computer, separately from the Alloy Discovery database server. However, this does not mean that the server must be exclusively dedicated to the Inventory Server. For details on installing and configuring the Inventory Server, see Installation Guide: Configuring the Inventory Server.

The Inventory Server performs the following tasks:

• Discovering computers and network devices on the network according to the schedule or on demand. For details, see Discovering Network Nodes.

• Auditing computers, Chromebooks and devices on the network according to the schedule or on demand. For details, see Auditing Network Nodes On Demand.

• Checking Network Folder Audit Sources, FTP Audit Sources and E-mail Audit Sources for new snapshots with the upload interval or on demand. For details, see Checking Network Folder, Email, and FTP Audit Sources for New Snapshots.

• Loading audit snapshots from the portable media. For details, see Receiving Portable Audit Results.

• Uploading audit snapshots to the Alloy Discovery database. During the upload process, the Inventory Server performs various operations to process received audit data, such as the following:

  • Recognizing software products and populating the Software Catalog. For details, see Managing the Software Catalog.
  • Tracking change history. For details, see Viewing the Change History.
  • Sending out alert notifications. For details, seeConfiguring Alerts .
  • Detecting and resolving audit conflicts. For details, see Conflict Policy.

  • Logging all events in Alloy Discovery. For details, see Log Management.

Alloy Discovery supports multiple Inventory Server instances for a single Alloy Discovery database. When you configure a Site, you associate it with a particular Inventory Server instance, and that server instance runs all discovery and audit tasks for the Site. However, only the primary instance uploads and processes all snapshots that other inventory servers collect.

INFO: For details, see Configuring Sites and Setting Up the Audit.

Register Inventory Server in the database and start

Once the Inventory Server is installed, you or another administrator can use the Inventory Server Manager to register the sever in the Alloy Discovery database and start it. This must be done on the computer where the Inventory Server is running.

For instructions, see Starting and Stopping the Inventory Server.

Tune Inventory Server performance

In the Settings App, you can view the properties of all Inventory Server instances registered in your Alloy Discovery database and tune up their performance. For instructions, see Viewing Inventory Server Properties and Tuning Inventory Server performance.

On distributed networks with multiple Inventory Server instances running, you need to set one instance as primary. Having a primary Inventory Server instance improves audit snapshot processing performance, because only that primary uploads and processes snapshots. That's why your primary inventory server must have the best ping time and lowest latency to the SQL Server.

INFO: You can also manage the Inventory Server tasks. For instructions, see Managing the Task List.