Introduction

Snow Inventory Agent for Unix is used for the inventory of Unix computers. It is a Java application that is locally installed on each computer that is to be inventoried. The agent scans the computer and saves the collected data to a compressed and encrypted file, which is sent to a Snow Inventory endpoint (Master Server, Service Gateway, or Snow Extender).

The agent gathers information about computer hardware and installed software packages from the built-in package manager in Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX. Inventory of Oracle database products using the Snow Inventory Oracle Scanner can be enabled as an option.

Since the agent is locally installed on each computer, inventory can be scheduled to occur on a regular basis always giving up-to-date information on hardware and software changes. It is recommended to schedule the agent to run at a given interval. This can be achieved by using the built-in scheduling service in Unix or similar.

There is also a possibility to perform software inventory using scanning of running processes and file scanning of specified directories. This can be used as a complement since the package managers do not always have information on all installed software. Information returned from this scan is less descriptive than the information from the package managers. Software inventory using running processes is performed by default. For more information, see Scanning of running processes.

Note that the descriptions on how to install and run the Unix agent apply to the latest version of the agent. Some of the described functionality may work differently or not at all in previous versions.