Welcome
Tuning performance
Learn how to plan the infrastructure of BigFix Inventory and to configure the application server to achieve optimal performance. The following guidelines are applicable in big data environments as well as in smaller environments that are running on low-performance hardware.
REST API considerations
You can use BigFix Inventory REST API to retrieve large amounts of data that is related to computer systems, software instances, and license usage in your environment. Such information can then be passed to other applications for further processing and analysis.

BigFix Documentation Homepage
BigFix 11 Inventory Documentation
Welcome to the BigFix Inventory documentation, where you can find information about how to install and configure BigFix Inventory. The application provides you with information about your inventory and license metrics. You can manage your software assets, gather information about your hardware, and ensure license compliance for your enterprise using BigFix Inventory.
BigFix Platform
Overview
Become familiar with key concepts that are necessary to understand how BigFix Inventory works and learn about features and functions that are introduced in every version of the application.
Installing
Learn about the requirements and available installation scenarios to ensure that the deployment of BigFix Inventory goes smoothly in your environment.
Configuring
After you install BigFix Inventory, configure the application. Create accounts for the users who need access to the application and set up scans to collect software and hardware inventory data from your environment.
Upgrading
A new version of BigFix Inventory is released periodically, typically at the end of each calendar quarter. Upgrade to the new version regularly to take full advantage of new features and application fixes.
Catalog Overview
This section provides information about catalog updates available with every release.
Managing the infrastructure
After you complete the initial configuration of BigFix Inventory, learn how to manage components of its infrastructure: VM managers, server, database, and data sources.
Software inventory and license utilization
You can classify the discovered software so that reports in BigFix Inventory reflect your entitlements and properly show utilization of license metrics by particular products.
Managing security threats
Learn how to use BigFix Inventory to manage security threats in your environment. You can view whether any of the installed components is prone to any Common Vulnerability and Exposure (CVE).
Tutorials
Tutorials help you understand how to use BigFix Inventory. They consist of modules that focus on broad goals. Modules consist of tasks that show how to configure specific settings step-by-step.
Security
Configure different security features to adequately protect business assets and resources in the data model when using BigFix Inventory.
Troubleshooting and support
Learn about solutions to common problems that might arise when you use BigFix Inventory BigFix Inventory and how to find logs and trace files that help you troubleshoot those problems.
Tuning performance
Learn how to plan the infrastructure of BigFix Inventory and to configure the application server to achieve optimal performance. The following guidelines are applicable in big data environments as well as in smaller environments that are running on low-performance hardware.
- Setting up scans and import
  Learn how to improve the scanning and importing activities to optimize the performance in your infrastructure.
- Additional tasks for improving performance
  Learn about additional tasks that you might want to perform to improve the performance in your infrastructure.
- Tuning performance in medium and large environments
  You can learn the possible causes of the most common performance issues in medium and large environments. Follow the tips and the known solutions to these issues to keep the system in good shape and avoid performance problems.
- REST API considerations
  You can use BigFix Inventory REST API to retrieve large amounts of data that is related to computer systems, software instances, and license usage in your environment. Such information can then be passed to other applications for further processing and analysis.
  - Optimizing response time
    Starting from 10.0.2, BigFix Inventory uses HTTP streaming for JSON responses. As a result, pagination can be omitted and the whole dataset can be fetched using a single query. The pagination feature is still available and can be used. When using the pagination feature, it is recommended to retrieve the total number of records only once and then iterate over pages.
  - Options to limit size of the individual response
    Starting from 10.0.2, BigFix Inventory uses HTTP streaming in JSON responses. In HTTP response method, the HTTP Header Transfer Encoding is set to chunked and the response size is not determined. As a result, the data is available in stream as the database provides records that matches the API. With this improvement, pagination in the API is optional and all data can be fetched with a single query.
  - Synchronizing with Data Imports
  - Understanding data changes
Integrating with REST API
External systems integration is one of the key features of BigFix Inventory. Business logic is enabled for integration and interfaces are provided for common integration points.
Glossary
Guide in PDF format
DataFlow ServiceNow Integration

REST API considerations

You can use BigFix Inventory REST API to retrieve large amounts of data that is related to computer systems, software instances, and license usage in your environment. Such information can then be passed to other applications for further processing and analysis.

Although using single API requests to retrieve data only from a selected subset of computers does not greatly impact the performance of BigFix Inventory, this is not true when retrieving data in bulk for all your computer systems at the same time. Such an action requires the processing of large amounts of data and it always influences the application performance and when possible should not be executed during data import.

In general, the API requests should not be used together with other performance intensive tasks, like software scans or data imports. Each user that is logged in to the application, as well as the number of actions that are performed in the web user interface during the REST API calls also decrease the performance.

Important: Each time you want to retrieve data through REST API, ensure that the use of BigFix Inventory at a moderate level, so that the extra workload resulting from REST API does not overload the application and create performance problems.

Special considerations

Up to version 10.0.2, the application that calls the APIs, must control the size of individual response. Starting from 10.0.2, BigFix Inventory uses HTTP streaming in JSON responses. As a result, the response does not cause buffering on the server side to calculate the response size.
Before 10.0.2, BigFix Inventory used to send a HTTP error code in case of any issue during preparing whole response. Starting from 10.0.2, if an error occurs during streaming and the streaming gets interrupted, you must interpret the problem as an error.
Check only for changes in data and do not fetch all the data every time. Use valid_from / valid_to or discovery_start / discovery_end fields to retrieve changes.
When you complete your data import, BigFix Inventory does not call the APIs. In case, you attempt to perform this process, the request may fail with a misleading error. It is recommended to implement an option for the application to retry the request after some time.