Walkthrough: Inventory using Live Browse

Introduction

This topic is intended for systems administrators with knowledge of server and infrastructure management, but who are new to BSA.

The goal of this topic is to examine the configuration of servers in your environment. Live browsing provides real-time data for all of its managed servers. When you live browse, you can quickly examine any managed server and inventory its configuration settings. For example, you can check which applications are installed, determine which services are running, examine registry settings, and identify local users.

The information you see during live browse shows the current state of a server. The information is not stored in a database, so it can never go stale. Live browse information is obtained in real time from the server itself. Often, you can often pinpoint problems in your server environment by simply browsing their configuration.

What is live browse?

You can browse any server in the Servers folder by right-clicking the server and selecting Browse.  A tab showing the server's name opens at right. At the bottom of the tab, there are four sub-tabs:

• Live browse — Shows a hierarchical tree consisting of multiple nodes. Each node represents a type of server object found on that server. The tree also shows any components and extended objects associated with the server. You can expand any node in the live browse list to see a list of server objects, such as Hotfixes or RPMs. Virtual environments contain specialized Live node children. For example, you can browse a virtual system to review a variety of server objects (such as cluster, host and configuration information) related to the virtual system.

• Activity — Shows job activity that has occurred on the server. 

• Snapshot Results — Shows the results of all Snapshot Jobs involving the server. 
• Audit Results — Shows the results of all Audit Jobs involving the server.

How to inventory your environment using live browse

The following walkthrough shows how to inventory services, applications, and registry settings for a server. You can use the same basic procedure to inspect other categories of data available from any server, such as file systems, security settings, or system information.

	Step	Example
1	Using the BSA Console, expand the Servers folder at left and navigate to a subfolder that holds a server you want to inspect with live browse.
2	Right-click the server you want to inspect and select Browse. Tip Smart folders are a great way to organize servers for display in the Servers folder. For example, you can defined a smart server folder to show all servers with an OS vendor version of Windows 2008 R2.
3	To inventory services running on this server, click Services. A list of all services appears. You can inventory their status. If necessary, you can click a particular server and start or stop it.
4	To inventory applications installed on this server, click Applications. A list of all applications appears.
5	To inventory Windows registry settings, select Registry and navigate to the particular setting you want to inspect.
6	To inventory settings for the "Guest" local user, expand Local Users and then select Guest.

Wrapping it up

In this topic, you used BSA to inventory systems in your environment in real time using the Live Browse capability.

Where to from here

Now that you have added servers to your environment and know how to examine them, you can use BSA to audit a single configuration item.