Spiceworks - Remote Sites and Custom Group Scan questions

[lylewaugh]

I have Spiceworks setup on-prem with remote sites configured. I have one central server doing HelpDesk and Inventory (for local subnet only) and remote sites doing inventory for their local subnets.

We have 30+ offices spread out all around the world and I decided to place a remote site installation in each office to (in my mind) make scanning easier and faster, make separating subnets easier and alleviate any issues stemming from any MPLS outages.

Custom Groups are setup by IP range. I have created scan schedules based on these custom groups. My central server (and me) sit in California. Since the scan schedules are only done on the central server, are the times local to the central server or local to the remote site. I’m assuming the central server sees a scheduled event occur, tells the remote site server to start the scan and that’s it. So I’m basing my times off that. I want it to run at 9am in Europe, I set it to midnight Pacific time, yes?

Second issue is this: When a scheduled scan starts, does it also do discovery? I need to be sure that each time it runs, it does a discovery first. We have lots of people who travel and use laptops so it may be a few weeks or months before these scans catch everyone.

[matts (Matt S (Spiceworks))]

So, the answers to your questions are yes and no.

The scans are based on the time at the central server, so you’ll need to take that into account when scheduling Group Scans.

The central server does not, however, handle Discovery Scans at all. It’s only responsible for Group Scans.
Each Remote Collector is in charge of it’s own Discovery Scans (which is why you need to enter subnet information into each RC). They run the discovery on the schedule entered into the RC and report their findings back to the central server.

That’s why two-way communication is so important in the Remote Site model. If you’ve only got Central → Remote going, things don’t work properly :-\

I hope that clears some things up. If you have any other questions, let me know!

[lylewaugh]

Hi Matt.

Two-way communication is working without issues. I was able see that this morning my device counts have increased in some of the remote sites. That’s exactly what I was hoping to see. I don’t recall the counts on all the sites from yesterday but I know the one in Germany was only at 64 and today it is at 134. So it seems the scheduling and discovery is all working properly.

One other question: I have the Remote Site connectivity check enabled. I changed the Connectivity Check Timeout to the max of 3 minutes. Oddly, I got about 30 emails over night. Site CAMAR is unavailable @ 2:20 and then @ 2:22 Site CAMAR is available. It happened for all the various sites and always 2 minutes apart. I want to see these emails, but only if it’s unreachable for like 15 minutes or so. Is there a way to change this without turning off the email notifications altogether? Here’s how it’s set right now: