Working with cloud plugins

If you have the cloud plugins enabled and they have discovered cloud instances in your environment, you can access those cloud devices from the Devices page and work with them.

The Devices page enumerates all the devices in your environment, indicates whether they are physical or virtual, how many in either category, and whether they have BigFix agent installed or not.

The data grid view can be customized easily and columns can be added / removed / reorganized.

The objective of device correlation is to avoid duplication of resources and streamline the device management. When BigFix discovers devices on the cloud (either private or public), it determines whether these are already known or tracked in the system. The advantage of asset correlation is that if there are multiple representations of a single endpoint, they are all aggregated and presented on the Devices page as a single endpoint. You as an operator can then select any group (of such representations) to target actions, and then any representation within the group as target for each specific action. You can also limit the operators' access to only manage specific representations of a device.

After installing the cloud plugins and discovering the cloud resources, you can see the summary of your cloud devices in WebUI Overview under Cloud Dashboard. To view the Cloud Dashboard, click the Overview button beneath the navigation bar and select Cloud Dashboard. This dashboard contains tiles for monitoring the amount of cloud resources in your environment, with or without an agent installed, and their distribution by type and region. Click any bar chart to open the Devices page, which lists that subset of resources, where the filters BigFix Agent Status and Managed by are pre-selected.

As a BigFix Operator, you can view the Device document. Device document provides information gathered from various sources.

If it is a cloud instance, you see data related to cloud as well on this page. To narrow down the search to cloud devices, you can use filters such as BigFix Agent Status (Installed or Not installed) or Managed by (Cloud and which Cloud provider).

Plugin settings

The following configurations are set using the SetPluginSettingsIntoStore function exported by the Plugin Portal common header. These settings retrieve all the plugin store settings that are used to populate the console dashboards and the dashboard in WebUI.

Table 1. SetPluginSettingsIntoStore Settings

Plugin Name	Description
Credentials_LoginSuccess<useralias>	Avoids credential locking if lockout policies are in place. Values: Set to “1” when the login succeeds. Set to “0” if the cloud provider refuses the credentials. For example, HTTP error 401 sets this setting to “0” that indicates that a password is no longer valid. If the login fails for something different form HTTP 401 (for example, network error or any other HTTP error code) nothing is set.
Discovery_LastScan	Contains the timestamp (unix time) of the last discovery attempt.
Discovery_LastScanNoErrors	Contains the timestamp (unix time) of the last discovery attempt completed with no errors. This is to support multicredentials. For example, if you have 10 credential sets, the discovery is attempted for each one. If one credential set fails due to password expiration, the LastScan is set because one discovery is already done, but LastScanNoErrors is not set. If no error occurred, LastScanNoErrors and LastScan are set to the same value.
Discovery_LastError	Contains the last error message (whatever it is) that a full discovery finds during its execution. It is reset when the full discovery terminates with no errors. In other words, this is set if LastScanNoErrors != LastScan; this is set to “” when LastScanNoErrors == LastScan.