Description of assistants

The purpose of any assistant is to display additional information in the network tree and/or to filter the network tree. Assistants are sorted into groups by the nature of this information: Hardware, Sensors, Software, Inventory, or Miscellaneous.

Each assistant has a condition. When an assistant is active, every network node is matched against its condition.

When the Indicator mode is active , the nodes that passed the check are marked with an icon.

Hovering the mouse cursor over this icon will provide additional information in the form of a hint.

In the Filter mode , an assistant will hide all assets that do not satisfy its condition.

If you’ve got a suggestion for a new assistant type, feel free to send us a message! Use the main menu option Feedback / Feature request and tell us. Perhaps, with the next update, you’ll find your assistant in the program.

Hardware

Installed RAM

Compares the amount of RAM on an asset with the user-defined value.

The Indicator displays an icon with the amount of RAM. The criteria for displaying the volume of OP are the conditions “<“,”=” or “>“.

Example of usage

Filter and show all assets in the network tree that have less than 4Gb RAM.

Virtual type

Shows whether a device is physicalor virtual.

The Filter hides all assets that have different virtual types than selected.

Example of usage

Excluding all virtual devices from a hardware report.

 

Sensors

Most devices have built-in sensors to control and monitor the status of the equipment. The assistants from this group, thanks to the information collected from the sensors during scanning, allow you to filter devices by specified values.

You can add several sensor assistants, therefore accurately setting the required values or range of values.

A large number of conditions allow you to fine-tune device filtering:

The following assistants are available in the Sensors menu that displays device temperatures: CPU temperature, GPU temperature, Motherboard temperature, and Drive temperature.

Sensors that indicate the fan speed are also available: CPU fan, GPU fan, and Motherboard fan.

Example of usage

Show all devices in the network tree with a CPU temperature over 60 degrees and a CPU fan speed of 800 rpm or less.

Software

Operating system

The Indicator displays the icon representing the installed OS and its version. The full title and version of the OS can be found in the hint.

The Filter hides all assets that run on an OS from a different OS family than the one specified (Windows, Linux, MacOS, FreeBSD or ESXi).

OS architecture

The Indicator displays the bitness of the operating system on each computer: either 32-bit or 64-bit, iconsandrespectively.

The Filter hides all assets that have different bitness than selected.

Tracked software

This assistant is related to the Software accounting mode, where it’s possible to enable tracking for the presence or absence of certain software on selected assets. It has three modes and can point out the computers with must-have violations, forbidden violations, or both. In the must-have mode, the assistant displays an icon for each asset where “must-have” software is not found and the amount of such software. With forbidden, an icon is displayed for each asset where forbidden software is found. When choosing all, an icon is displayed when both types of violations exist. The hint lists which software caused the icon to appear and the type of violation.

Inventory

Last snapshot age

Compares the age of the latest snapshot with the user-defined number of days.

The Indicatordisplays the number of days since the asset was last scanned.

Example of usage

View all the assets that were not scanned for at least a month.

Resident agent state

Displays the status of the resident agent on the device and shows the assigned profile in the hint.

The indicatordisplays that the agent is installed and has an up-to-date version on a device.
The indicator displays that the resident agent file is installed but needs to be updated.
The indicator displays the absence of a resident agent installed.

Misc

Online status

TNI pings all the assets in the storage once every several seconds, and this assistant is used to display the result in the Network tree.

In the Filter mode, by default, this assistant only shows the nodes that are online at the moment(or offline, if the user changes the condition).

Automatic ping of nodes allows you to keep track of when a node was last time online. This information can be viewed in the Viewer and Reports tab, as well as in the Table reports tab using the report builder.

The “Offline” Indicator shows that a node does not respond on the ping.

The “Hostname not resolving” Indicatordisplays that when attempting to ping a node with a dynamic IP, the specified network name for it was not found in DNS.

The “Unknown” Indicatorpoints out that an asset does not have a network interface or has not been pinged yet by the program after the storage was loaded.

The automatic ping function can be turned off in the Options in the program.

If necessary, you can make a selective ping of the selected groups or nodes through the context menu using the corresponded command .

Note contents

Each asset can have a noteassigned to it. It can contain comments added by the TNI user.

Notes can be easily added in the Common reports mode or in Network node properties.

This assistant’s condition contains a search string. When left blank, all the nodes that have a note will satisfy the condition. When text is entered into the assistant’s field, only the nodes which have a note containing the entered text as part of it will satisfy the condition.

The Indicator displays an icon for each asset that satisfies the condition. The hint contains the full note.

Example of usage

It’s a good idea to include a short keyword in every note along with the actual message (e.g., “TODO” for tasks, “FIX” for faulty assets, “UPGRADE” for assets that need to be upgraded, etc.) In this case, the Note contents assistant becomes very helpful. For instance, you can use it to filter all the nodes by the presence of “FIX” in their notes, which will yield a list of malfunctioning assets. Then you hover your mouse over one of them to find out what exactly is wrong:

Alerts presence

The Indicator displays a red flag  and the number of problems in front of each asset where problems have been detected.

The Filter allows you to hide all the devices that don’t have any alerts. This can be useful when building an alert report.

See: Alerts

The condition contains a search string. Only the nodes that have the string as part of their name or additional text will satisfy the condition.

See: Searching in the Network tree.

Asset kind

Allows to filter assets in the Network tree by their scan status. There are 3 options:

  • Scanned assets: only shows assets that have been successfully scanned at least once;
  • Assets failed to scan: only shows assets that have not been successfully scanned or where all snapshots have been deleted (these assets are also known as stubs or placeholders);
  • Custom assets: only show assets created by the user

Open ports

The Filter allows to find assets where a particular port is opened.
The condition contains a search string for the port number. When left blank, all the nodes will satisfy the condition.

The Indicator displays an iconfor each asset that satisfies the condition. The hint contains the report on open ports from the latest scan.

Subnet

The assistant allows you to filter devices within the specified network range. The Indicator in the form of a network iconwill show devices that have passed conditions and filtration.

The equality sign “=” allows you to show all devices included in the specified range of network addresses.

Filtering by the “<>” condition allows you to see all devices that are not in the specified range of IP addresses.

Example of usage

Filter the list of all assets that are not in the 10.0.0.0/24 network and display devices in the 192.168.1.1 — 192.168.1.63 network range

AD Objects

Displays objects that belong to a domain.

The Indicator displays an icon pointing to the nodes included in the domain or Active Directory group at the specified address in the format OU=group,DC=example,DC=com

Example of usage

Filter and show the list of assets that are in the “SolarSystem” group and “Milky.way” domain

Asset lists

This assistant allows you to create your own device lists, which can then be quickly displayed using the Filter mode.

To create a list of specific devices, select the required devices in the network tree using multiple selections, then go to the assistant and create a new list.

If you need to make changes to an already created list, re-select the necessary nodes in the network tree and save the list using the Save button opposite it in the assistant’s menu.

The Indicatorshows the presence of the device in the list.

The Asset lists assistant is very helpful when using Table Reports and when you need to build reports for specific devices from the network tree.

Example of usage

It is required to create a list of computers with a 32-bit OS. To do this, select the root of the network tree, then go to the Tabular Reports tab and click on the standard template “Operating Systems” on the right side of the panel. Then, in the “Architecture” column, we line up devices according to this criterion and, holding down the Ctrl key, mark all the necessary devices with the mouse. Next, call the context menu through the right mouse click and select “Select in the tree”. After that, all necessary computers will be immediately marked in the network tree and it will be possible to save the list by these devices.

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