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.You can skip the task of preparing components by running a Component Discovery Job. Instead, you can set Compliance Jobs or Snapshot Jobs to perform automatic discovery and component generation at the beginning of job execution. Similarly, in an Audit Job, you can select a server as the master, and this selection also triggers automatic component discovery.

To create a Component Discovery Job

1. To create a new Component Discovery Job, do one of the following:
   • Open the Jobs folder and select a job group. Right-click and select New > Component Discovery Job from the pop-up menu.
   • Open the Component Templates folder and select a component template. Right-click and select Discover from the pop-up menu.
     The New Component Discovery Job wizard opens.

2. Define the Component Discovery Job, as described in the following topics:
3. Click Finish after completing the last step of the wizard.