Custom Site management

Usually, Custom Sites are designed to distribute content to endpoints having the BigFix Agent installed.

Subscribing the devices discovered by the Plugin Portal to a Custom Site with unusable content requires unnecessary effort to evaluate and manage the content, producing unnecessary resource usage and poor performance.

For this reason, starting from BigFix 10.0.4, the Plugin Portal adds an additional filter to subscribe the devices it discovers to Custom Sites.

Before BigFix 10.0.4, the Plugin Portal subscribed the devices to a Custom Site after evaluating the applicability relevance resulting from the subscription conditions of the site. Now the applicability relevance will be evaluated by the Plugin Portal only if it uses one of the following inspectors:
  • in agent context
  • in proxy agent context
  • in plugin portal context

If the applicability relevance of the Custom Site does not use any of the inspectors mentioned above, the Custom Site is not evaluated by the Plugin Portal: the devices it discovers will not subscribe the Custom Site.

If the applicability uses at least one of those inspectors, the subscription to the site depends on the evaluation of the applicability relevance, as happened with previous releases.

To clarify with an example, before BigFix 10.0.4, to subscribe all agents to a Custom Site you can use this relevance expression:
  • true
corresponding to the All Computers choice in the Computer Subscription Console tab.
Starting from BigFix 10.0.4, if you need to include also the Plugin Portal agents, you have to explicitly use one of the above described inspectors, for example:
  • true or in plugin portal context
otherwise the agents discovered by the Plugin Portal do not subscribe to the site.

This change only applies to the Plugin Portal represented endpoints, not to endpoints represented by the Proxy Agent.

Nothing changes for agents not discovered by the Plugin Portal, they subscribe the Custom Site depending on the evaluation of the site applicability relevance.

Nothing changes for the content of the Custom Site: if a device subscribes the site, the applicability of each content element (Fixlet, task, analysis...) depends only on the relevance specified for the element.

The feature can be disabled by setting

_BESPluginPortal_Performance_ExcludeCustomSitesSubscription = 0

to the client where the Plugin Portal is installed. With this setting, the Plugin Portal behaves as in versions prior to 10.0.4.

This feature is enabled by default. As a consequence, when upgrading the Plugin Portal from versions older than 10.0.4, the Plugin Portal agents might get unsubscribed from certain Custom Sites. If you want to prevent this behavior, you must disable the feature before upgrading. When upgrading using the BigFix Console, the Fixlet Updated Plugin Portal - BigFix version X also gives you an option to disable it. This option is not available using the BigFix WebUI.

Here are some examples of Custom Site applicability relevance:

  • to subscribe only the Plugin Portal agents:
    • in plugin portal context
  • to subscribe only the native agents:
    • in agent context
  • to subscribe all agents but not the Plugin Portal ones:
    • true
  • to subscribe all agents, use one of these:
    • true or in plugin portal context
    • true or in proxy agent context
  • to subscribe only the proxied agents, which are the ones discovered by the Plugin Portal or by the Proxy Agent, use one of these:
    • in proxy agent context
    • not in agent context
  • to subscribe all the Plugin Portal agents whose names contain “dept1”, case insensitive:
    • in plugin portal context and exists (computer name) whose (it as string as lowercase contains "dept1")
  • to subscribe all the proxied agents installed on a Red Hat OS:
    • in proxy agent context and exists (operating system) whose (name of it as lowercase contains "red hat")
  • to subscribe all agents installed on a Red Hat OS except the Plugin Portal ones:
    • exists (operating system) whose (name of it as lowercase contains "red hat")

Here are some examples using the Computer Subscription Console tab.

Since the Console resolves the Agent Type condition into an expression that uses the in proxy agent inspector, setting this condition will be enough to ensure that it is not ignored by the Plugin Portal.

  • To subscribe only proxied agents:

  • To subscribe all the agents:

  • To subscribe all agents of the specified Server Based Computer group: