Discovery on Demand

Starting from BigFix 11.0.6, the Plugin Portal adds a method to manually trigger the discovery process for specific cloud plugins on demand.

This new capability, introduced in Version 11.0.6, forces an immediate update of the discovered assets without waiting for the scheduled discovery interval, which is particularly useful during troubleshooting or when immediate visibility of new assets is required.

The new "Discovery on Demand" feature allows administrators to trigger the discovery immediately on the specified Plugin Portal computers.

Mechanism

There are now two methods to trigger this discovery:
  1. Push Notification (via REST API)
  2. Notify Client Command (via ActionScript)

Push Notification (REST API)

The discovery can be triggered using the pushnotification REST API with the notification type PluginPortalDiscovery.

https://<BigFix_Server_IP>:<Port>/api/pushnotification
The XML payload structure must contain a pushnotification element with the following child elements:
  • Type: Must be set to "PluginPortalDiscovery"
  • Payload: A list of cloud plugin IDs separated by | (pipe). Use "ALL" to trigger a discovery for all installed cloud plugins
  • ComputerID: The unique ComputerID of the computer where the Plugin Portal is installed.

Below is an example of how to trigger the discovery using the curl command and a defined XML file.

  1. Create the XML payload (named, for example, pushStartDiscovery.xml):
    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<BESAPI xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="BESAPI.xsd">
    <PushNotification>
        <Type>PluginPortalDiscovery</Type>
        <Payload>VMwareAssetDiscoveryPlugin|AzureAssetDiscoveryPlugin</Payload>
        <ComputerID>1617618421</ComputerID>
    </PushNotification>
</BESAPI>
  2. Send the request using the cURL command:
    curl -X POST --data-binary 
@/file_path/pushStartDiscovery.xml -u <BigFix Master Operator>:<password>
https://192.14.77.34:52311/api/pushnotification

ActionScript Command

The discovery can also be triggered directly through BigFix ActionScript using the notify client command and targeting the computer where the Plugin Portal is installed. This allows the discovery to be embedded into the Fixlets.

The syntax is as follows: 
notify client PluginPortalDiscovery <list of plugins>

where <list of plugins> is a string containing cloud plugin IDs separated by | (pipe), or the keyword ALL to trigger every installed cloud plugin.

For example:
notify client PluginPortalDiscovery "VMwareAssetDiscoveryPlugin|GCPAssetDiscoveryPlugin
|AWSAssetDiscoveryPlugin|AzureAssetDiscoveryPlugin"