Upgrading the FlexNet Inventory Agent

FlexNet Manager Suite 2019 R2 (On-Premises Edition)

Upgrades to your inventory beacon(s) do not trigger any automatic updates to the FlexNet inventory agents that you have deployed on target machines for local inventory collection. Even when there is an update to the central application server, this does not automatically upgrade FlexNet inventory agents. This gives you freedom to manage the upgrade of deployed FlexNet inventory agents independently of upgrades to other parts of the system.

Various formats of the inventory gathering tools require different management of upgrades:
  • FlexNet inventory agents installed locally on inventory targets (either through 'adoption' or third-party deployment), and collecting agent policy from an inventory beacon, can self-update automatically, once you specify the permitted version. You can manage different versions for different platforms, or even limit updates to a specific target set of devices. Manage self-updates in the Inventory agent for automatic deployment section of the Inventory Settings page (Discovery & Inventory > Settings, and see Inventory Agent for Automatic Deployment for details). Alternatively, you can modify settings stored in the central operations databases (for details, see Specifying Agent Version for Auto-Updates (or Adoption)).
    Tip: This inventory setting grants permission (through policy) to the FlexNet inventory agents to perform self-upgrades or downgrades to the specified version. The setting, therefore, can only be put into effect on those platforms where the FlexNet inventory agent includes self-update functionality. Currently, FlexNet inventory agents on Debian or Ubuntu Linux do not include self-update functionality. On these platforms, you can do any of:
    • Deploy new versions of FlexNet inventory agent manually
    • Use your preferred third-party deployment tool to publish updates to FlexNet inventory agents
    • Uninstall the old version(s) of FlexNet inventory agent, and once again target the devices for adoption through FlexNet Manager Suite.
  • If you have chosen to deploy the full FlexNet inventory agent to some location where it cannot be updated by policy, you can distribute new versions using your preferred mechanism. All you need first is to collect the required version(s) of FlexNet inventory agent, as described below.
  • Copies of the FlexNet inventory core components installed on inventory beacons and used for Zero-footprint inventory collection are updated as part of the FlexNet Beacon self-update. You do not need any further controls for this process (other than those applying to the FlexNet Beacon update). Refer back to Upgrading Inventory Beacons for more details.
  • If you are using copies of the lightweight FlexNet Inventory Scanner, you need to update those copies using the same techniques by which you deployed it in the first place.
  • If you have used other techniques to deploy the FlexNet inventory core components to file shares or other locations of your choosing (where they are not collecting agent policy automatically), you need to use your preferred technique for deploying updated components.

If you wish to deploy a current version of the FlexNet inventory agent using either a third-party tool or manual deployment, see Inventory Agent for Download for details on how to obtain it from the web interface for FlexNet Manager Suite.