Description of assistants

The purpose of an assistant is to display additional information in the Network tree and/or filter the Network tree. Assistants are grouped according to the type of information they provide: Hardware, Sensors, Software, Inventory, or Miscellaneous.

Each assistant has a condition. When an assistant is active, every network node is checked against that condition.

When the Indicator mode is active , nodes that meet the condition are marked with an icon.

Hovering the mouse cursor over this icon displays additional information in a hint.

In Filter mode , an assistant hides all assets that do not satisfy its condition.

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

Hardware

Installed RAM

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

The Indicator displays an icon showing the amount of RAM. The criteria for displaying the amount of RAM are the “<”, “=” and “>” conditions.

Example of usage
Filter and show all assets in the Network tree that have less than 4 GB of RAM.

Virtual type

Shows whether a device is physicalor virtual.

The Filter hides all assets whose virtual type differs from the selected type.

Example of usage
Exclude all virtual devices from a hardware report.

Sensors

Most devices have built-in sensors to monitor their status. The assistants in this group use information collected from sensors during scanning to filter devices by specified values.

You can add several sensor assistants, allowing you to precisely specify the required values or ranges of values.

A wide range of conditions allows you to fine-tune device filtering:

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

The following assistants for monitoring 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 above 60 degrees and a CPU fan speed of 800 rpm or less.

Software

Operating system

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

The Filter hides all assets running an operating system from a different OS family than the selected one (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 whose OS architecture differs from the selected one.

Tracked software

This assistant is related to the Software accounting mode, where you can enable tracking for the presence or absence of certain software on selected assets. It has three modes and can indicate 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. In Forbidden mode, an icon is displayed for each asset where forbidden software is found. When All is selected, 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 up to date on the device.
The indicator displays that the resident agent file is installed but needs to be updated.
The indicator indicates that no resident agent is installed.

Misc

Online status

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

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

Automatic ping of nodes allows you to keep track of when a node was last 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 to ping requests.

The “Hostname not resolving” Indicatorindicates that when the program attempts to ping a node with a dynamic IP address, its configured hostname cannot be resolved 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.

Automatic pinging can be disabled in the program’s Options.

If necessary, you can make a selective ping of the selected groups or nodes through the context menu using the corresponding 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 nodes whose notes contain the entered text will satisfy the condition.

The Indicator displays an icon for each asset that satisfies the condition. The tooltip displays 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 hover over one of them to find out what exactly is wrong:

Alerts presence

The Indicator displays a red flag and the number of detected problems next to each affected asset.

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

Node search

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 you 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 shows assets created by the user.

Open ports

The Filter allows you to find assets where a particular port is open.
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 tooltip displays the open ports reported in the latest scan.

Subnet

The assistant allows you to filter devices within the specified network range. The Indicator is displayed as a network iconis displayed for devices that match the specified conditions.

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 to exclude assets in the 10.0.0.0/24 network and display only devices in the 192.168.1.1–192.168.1.63 range:

AD Objects

Displays objects that belong to a domain.

The Indicator displays an icon next to nodes that belong to the specified domain or Active Directory organizational unit/group 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 selection, 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 next to it in the assistant’s menu.

The Indicatorindicates that the device is included 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
Suppose you want to create a list of computers running a 32-bit operating system. 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, sort the devices by this column and, holding down the Ctrl key, select the required devices with the mouse. Next, right-click to open the context menu and select “Select in the tree”. After that, all all selected computers will immediately be selected in the Network tree and you can then save the selected devices as an asset list.