Set up Assets Discovery Agent

Before you begin

• Note that you can install Assets Discovery Agent only on Windows-based machines (as it uses Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) for scanning and is installed as a Windows service).
• Download and install Assets Discovery but use the Discovery_Agent_Setup.msi installer instead to install Agent. 
• You must have Jira Admin permissions as well as administrator permissions on:
  • your Windows or Linux system to install Assets Discovery
  • your Windows system to install Assets Discovery Agent

Set up Assets Discovery Agent

To set up:

1. Install Agent on the machine and make sure that the firewall will accept connections from the inbound port 51337.
2. To collect the data, configure the agent settings of the Discovery tool. 
3. Configure the agent token to make sure that Discovery can communicate with the agent.

Collecting data from agents

Now that you have agents, you must enable Assets Discovery as a service to collect the data from them. 

We recommend that you deploy agents and run them without changing any of the default setting. However, if you want to, you can manually edit the advanced settings in the agent.cfg file. 

Configuring a dedicated account for running Agent service

By default, all Agent services that run in the background under the  NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM  account, grant extensive permissions, including unlimited access to the local machine. As this can pose a security risk if the Discovery Tool is compromised, we recommend that you use a dedicated administrator account to run this service on the agent and grant the minimum required privileges.  Learn which commands are executed by Assets Discovery

To change the account used by the service manually on each machine where Agent is installed:

1. Search for and open  services.msc  from the  Start  menu. 
2. Locate the Agent service and then right-click the service and select  Properties.
3. From the  Log on  tab, in the  Log on as  section, select the  This account  option and enter the credentials of the dedicated administrator account.
   

Manage agents

You can manage all your configured agents from here and view details including the version number and status of your agents (such as running, not available).

You can select one or more agents and perform the following actions.

Trigger scan

Assets Discovery will trigger the selected agents at the configured range to start a local scan.

Collect results

Select this to get data collected by agents to Discovery host.

Update Agents

You can update all connected agents (that are on version 7.0.0 or later) to the latest version directly from here, instead of navigating to each agent and updating it individually.

Revoke token

Revokes the unique token generated by the Discovery Agent. The token will be removed from the Discovery storage, and you'll need to use a pairing token (Agent Token) to re-establish communication with the Discovery. To revoke a token:

1. Select agents for which you want to revoke the token.
2. Select Revoke token. The selected agents will display an Unhealthy: invalid signature status.

3. Log into every machine where an agent runs and set a new agent token by running the discovery_agent.exe -token <AGENT_TOKEN> file.

4. Check that the agents show a healthy status.

How to force agents to transfer data to a target path

If you want to transfer the result data as an XML file to the configured target path, you can add an SFTP transfer setting.

Add the following code to the agents.cfg file, inside of the <Settings> node:

<SFTPSettings>
    <ExportPath>192.168.2.2/discovery/import</ExportPath>
    <UserName>yourUser</UserName>
    <Password>mysecurepassword</Password>
    <TransferReties>5</TransferReties>
    <TranserRetryInterval>30</TranserRetryInterval>
</SFTPSettings>

or use Discovery_Agent.exe -setupsftp (this will execute a small console configuration for the sftp transfer). Note that the password will be encrypted during the first startup.

Agent settings

Here’s some of the basic agent settings you’ll need to configure in the Agent tab.

Advanced settings