Search, View and Navigation

IBM Tivoli Inventory is an excellent tool for gathering hardware and software information but keeping the data up to date can prove difficult without spending considerable time performing manual distributions or writing large suites of scripts. Even if you opt for one of these options, reporting the success rate of the scans can start to be extremely time consuming, especially where the number of endpoints runs in to the thousands.

However using Odyssey 3.1 the setup, maintenance and subsequent reporting of the scans can actually now be extremely simple. The configuration I created for this article took less than 30 minutes, hence the title.

Resource Groups

A new concept in Odyssey 3.1 is the Resource Group. This is a virtual set of systems that is only populated at execution, allowing for wild cards and lookups to be performed to create the target list. In the case of an inventory scan it is likely that with a large number of systems you will have unique policies for different types of systems. For example you might choose to scan workstations at a less frequent interval to servers or scan Unix systems differently to Windows systems.

In the example I have used for this article I have created a Resource Group called Workstations that creates a virtual list of systems beginning with wrk (^wrk.*) and excludes all systems containing dev in the name however you can use any script you want to populate the list. Another option might be always choose the thirty oldest systems to be scanned.

Even if your policy is to scan all of your endpoints every day, a resource group will still be needed to ensure that if an endpoint is updated, added or removed the scan list is always accurate. This is not always the case with a conventional ProfileManager based subscription list.

Wizards

The Odyssey Wizards are powerful tools that perform multiple parallel actions on large numbers of resources such as Endpoints or Users. The processing can be automatically throttled and queued to ensure that the Tivoli environment does not get overloaded.

There are a range of customisable action types such as command execution, Tivoli tasks, HTTP interactions, perl and shell script execution and remote actions. For this scenario I have chosen to run three actions:

1. An action to test the age of the last scan is older that 7 days. This is slightly modified version of the standard Odyssey action called Last Scan Age which reports the last scan age in days. This action could alternatively be incorporated into the Resource Group.
2. A test to ensure the endpoint is running. This is supplied as a standard action called Status. This ensures any system that is targeted is up and running.
3. An Inventory Distribution Action. This action type allows you to choose any existing InventoryConfig profile, the batch size of the distribution (i.e. how many systems you want to distribute to at once) and a delay between distributions. You can also configure retries but in this instance I have not done this.

These three actions are joined together to form an Action group called Scheduled Workstation Scan.

Scheduler

New in version 3.1 is the Odyssey scheduler. This does not use either the Operating System or IBM Tivoli Schedulers and therefore allows complete independence from underlying tools to schedule actions. For this example I have used it to schedule the defined resource group so that at a selected interval it runs the chosen Scheduled Workstation Scan action group. As shown below I have chosen to schedule a workstation scan every 1 week.

By simply pressing OK the Inventory Scan schedule will be created, no more scripts and no more manual work.

During the Wizard's execution, or after it has finished, you may wish to check the progress of the scan. Without Odyssey this would mean command line interaction but with it you can view and sort each target to find what state it is in.

Reporting

Once the scheduled routine has been created the temptation would then be to forget about it and hope that it is successful. Using Odyssey it is simple to report on the success or failure of any Wizard session. Not only do you have the sortable table view shown above, but also on completion each wizard creates a web-based report that will show a summary of the success and failure rate.

Lastly in addition to the standard reports it is possible to click on any column in Odyssey and create a Pie Chart Summary. This is particularly useful for the Inventory Scan as it can be used on the Last Scan Age Column to create a neat summary of the age of all endpoint scans.