Creating Component Discovery Jobs

A Component Discovery Job associates one or more components with a server.

After you discover components, you can browse them and run Compliance, Snapshot, and Audit Jobs on them. You can also bundle the assets of a component into a BLPackage and deploy that package to servers where the component should reside.

Discovering a component merely determines that a server satisfies the signature of a component template. It does not ensure that all component template parts actually exist on a server. Ideally, component signatures should be so discriminating that successful discovery indicates the component's template parts are indeed all present. However, to ensure that the correct component parts are present on a server, you can also set up compliance rules for a component template (see Compliance tab for a component template) and then run a Compliance Job (see Creating Compliance Jobs).

When you discover a component, by default the component is given a set of permissions based on the maximum possible authorizations granted to your current role. For example, if your current role is granted Component.* permissions, the new component is granted Component.* permissions.

If components based on a component template already exist and you modify the definition of the component template, your changes to the component template are automatically applied to the existing component. However, if you modify the signature of a component template and then run a Component Discovery Job, the job flags a component as invalid if its configuration does not satisfy the revised signature.

Although the Component Discovery Job is designed to associate components with servers based on a precise set of criteria, you can also use it as an inventory tool. First you define a signature that indicates a software package is installed. For example, the signature may require the presence of a particular DLL. Then you run the Component Discovery Job against all servers of interest to you. The job creates components on servers where it finds the DLL in the specified location. In this way, you can quickly determine how many instances of a software package are installed.