About the Tools catalog

The Tools catalog is the per-Site list of remote-administration utilities that operators can launch from a device form. AlloyScan ships fourteen built-in entries — Ping, Trace route, Remote Desktop, VNC, Telnet, Wake on LAN, and similar — and lets administrators add custom ones on top.

This page covers what the catalog is for, how it executes, and the single most common point of confusion for support: tools do not run on the audited endpoint.

Where tools live

• The catalog itself — Admin Center > Site Settings > Customization > Tools — is admin-managed. Only Site Administrators can add, edit, or remove entries.
• The invocation surface — the Tools button on each device form — is available to operators and read-only Site Users. Whether a particular tool appears for a given device depends on the device's operating system gating.

How a tool actually runs (the load-bearing fact)

When an operator clicks a Tool on a device, the request does not reach the audited endpoint directly. Instead:

1. AlloyScan in the browser hands the tool definition and the target device's address parameters to the Alloy Integration Launcher running on the operator's workstation.
2. The Launcher invokes the local client that the tool definition names — the local Remote Desktop client, the local VNC viewer, the local Telnet client, ping.exe, tracert.exe, and so on — passing the device address as the argument.
3. The local client connects to the device.

The endpoint never sees AlloyScan; it sees a connection from the operator's workstation as if the operator had typed the command at a local terminal. This matters in three ways:

• Tools are useless without the Launcher. If the Launcher is not installed on the operator's workstation, every Tools button is a no-op.
• The local client must be installed. Remote Desktop needs the Microsoft RDP client. VNC needs a VNC viewer. Tools simply hand off to whichever local app the workstation provides.
• Network reachability is from the workstation, not from AlloyScan. A tool that would have worked from inside AlloyScan's network may fail when the operator is offsite, and vice versa.

Important: The most common support escalation around Tools is "I clicked Remote Desktop and nothing happened." Nine times out of ten the cause is a missing Launcher or a missing local client on the operator's workstation, not a problem inside AlloyScan.

Built-in versus custom

The fourteen built-in tools cover the operations that most operators reach for repeatedly. They are pre-configured and do not need administrator setup beyond verifying that the right local clients are installed on operator workstations.

Custom tools are for everything else — site-specific scripts, internal tooling, third-party clients with non-standard invocation. Each custom tool has a Name, an invocation template that names the local executable and the argument substitution, and target-OS gating that decides which devices show it. The exact set of fields on the custom-tool form may vary by deployment.

Limitations

• Tools execute synchronously from the operator's workstation. AlloyScan does not retain output and does not log per-invocation results.
• Tools do not have an audit trail at the AlloyScan level. The only record is whatever the local client and the endpoint write.

Related

• How to create a custom tool — admin-side catalog management.
• Tools Reference — admin reference for the catalog.
• Built-in Tools Reference — operator-side list of the fourteen built-ins (User Guide).
• How to use a tool on a device — operator-side invocation guide (User Guide).