New preview capability - Track your hard-to-reach assets using IT Agent, the future of LsAgent

[Gilian]

Hi everyone!

Lansweeper is delighted to announce the availability of its new IT Agent in your Lansweeper Site, now in Preview. Track your hard-to-reach assets using the IT Agent which tracks the details of a single computer running Windows, Linux, or Apple MacOS and sends these directly to your Lansweeper Site.

How to access IT Agent in your Lansweeper Site

1. Open a browser and navigate to https://app.lansweeper.com.
2. Choose the Lansweeper Site to which you want to link the IT Agent Discovery. 
3. Go to Scanning > Discovery systems > Download installers/packages > IT Agent Discovery

A brief explanation

• Learn how to install/deploy IT Agent here.

• After a successful installation, the IT Agent(s) will be shown in your Lansweeper Site in Scanning > Discovery systems.

• To see the asset data, you can open Inventory > All assets (and you can use the search/advanced filter on the top right to filter on the specific assets/installation where IT Agent is running)

Product comparison

Lansweeper Network Discovery vs Lansweeper IT Agent (Portable) Discovery

Topic	Lansweeper Network Discovery	Lansweeper IT Agent Discovery	Lansweeper IT Agent Portable Discovery
Summary	Discover all IT (and later OT) assets in your network	Get all details of the computers you know that have IT Agent Discovery installed and running as a background service or daemon.	Planned, not available yet. Get all details of the computers on which you run IT Agent as a foreground application. Ideal to be included in a logon script
Asset reach	Tracks both the machine running Network Discovery and discovers IT (and later OT) assets remotely	Local computer tracking where the IT Agent Discovery is running	Local computer tracking where the IT Agent Discovery is running
Credentials	Requires credentials to get all asset details remotely	Does not require credentials	Does not require credentials
Network access	Requires specific ports to be open on the assets to discover. See Ports scanned or used by Lansweeper	Few connectivity requirements. See Install IT Agent	An encryption key from a Lansweeper Network Discovery - Hub component. Either direct access to the hub or a location to store the discovery result file in, for later import.

Request for feedback

It's time for us to let you try and test this new feature. We hope this first version will give you an easy-to-deploy agent-based discovery.

Finally, we're all ears! Your feedback is valuable, and we'd love to hear it.

Feel free to share in the comments or share your logs and screenshots privately to preview@lansweeper.com

Kind regards,

Gilian De Raes
Product Manager | Lansweeper

[eputz]

We only use the ITAgent with our site and have no additional discovery methods configured so are a bit confused why we're seeing instances of Ring doorbells, CCTV cameras and smart TVs appearing in our inventory when we're currently only interested in assets that have the IT Agent installed?

[Gilian]

Hi @eputz 

Thanks for sharing. In https://app.lansweeper.com can you go to scanning > Discovery groups?

Next, can you ensure your IT Agents are member of the group "Default Group IT Agent" and not "Default Group"?

"Default group" has network visibility enabled by default, whereas "Default Group IT Agent" only focuses on the device where the IT Agent is running (workstations/servers on Windows/Linux/macOS)

After correcting the group membership, you can remove the assets from the other asset types from your inventory and they should not be re-added after a next discovery from your IT Agents.

[eputz]

Thanks I'll take a look. Going forward how do we ensure that our ongoing ITAgent installs are not ending up in that Default group as we don't want to have to keep manually managing group memberships?

[Gilian]

@eputz this was resolved during the current preview phase. All new IT Agents are now joining "Default IT Agent" Group by default. You can change their membership manually in your LS Site to give them different settings like their auto update behavior.

[eputz]

@Gilian so we have 2552 components in 'Default Group' and 2367 in 'Default Group IT Agent' , when I click into the Default Group, I'm not seeing any option for managing the membership - it's all greyed out so how do we easily:

1. bulk manage the discovery group membership of our assets
2. get a report to see which groups our assets below too?

[eputz]

@Gilian - Hi Gilian - any update on how we can bulk manage the Group Memberships for our ITAgents for a bulk move of the 2000+ devices which are not in the 'Default Group IT Agent' ?

[Gilian]

@eputz not available yet, but I've asked an update from our development team. This should become available during this month, October.

[eputz]

Hi @Gilian - any update on when the bulk management for group memberships will be available?

[wborquez]

In our environment, we are considering using Acronis to create an image of the operating system with the IT Agent Discovery preinstalled. The goal is to apply this image to other endpoints to streamline the deployment of the agent across multiple devices.
Is it compatible to use Acronis to create an image of the operating system with IT Agent Discovery preinstalled, and then deploy this image on other endpoints?

[Gilian]

Hi @wborquez ,

Currently IT Agent registers itself in a Lansweeper Site when being installed. If you would redeploy the image to other devices, this would result in either authentication issues or all assets reporting to the same IT Agent installation (which is not recommended).

Once IT Agent can connect to a Network Discovery Hub your scenario will be supported though (as the Hub registers itself to a Lansweeper Site as 1 single registration).

For now, it's advised to do deployment using silent install after the images are running on the endpoint.