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TS.Census Support

Frequently Asked Questions

Answers for our most frequently asked questions are provided below. Please contact Product Support for more details or, of course, to ask other questions.

Frequently asked questions about:

PC Inventory and Asset Tracking

Q. What are the recommended System requirements for TS.Census Asset Inventory?
A. See the following Tech Note: TS.Census System Requirements.

Q. Can I create my own TS.Census Asset Inventory reports?
A. Yes. You can modify any of the included reports or create your own query and export the data.

You can also use Crystal Reports to create your own reports for either SQL Server or Oracle databases.

Q. Does TS.Census Asset Inventory integrate with SMS?
A. Yes, PowerCensus enables you to prepare data collected by TS.Census Asset Inventory for collection by SMS. TS.Census Asset Inventory data enters the SMS database and is available for reporting.

Q. Can I restrict report access to departments or cost centers?
A. TS.Census Asset Inventory allows you to provide specific reports to only the people who need to see them.

Q. I manage several locations. Can I inventory them all as one company or do they all require a separate TS.Census Asset Inventory installation?
A. TS.Census Asset Inventory is designed to inventory organizations with single or multiple sites. Collection Servers can be distributed over many locations, and inventory results are loaded into a single database for reporting.

Q. Can I use multiple files to create a local software fingerprint?
A. Yes. TS.Census Asset Inventory allows the use of multiple files to create software fingerprints.

Q. How often are Product Recognition Updates (PRUs) released?
A. Every month. Product Recognition Updates offer hundreds of new hardware and software products that will be automatically recognized by Census products. They are available on a monthly basis to customers with current support.

Q. What are the different methods of installing the Collection Client?
A. The Collection Client may be installed using any of the following methods:

  • Via a login script pointing to the File Store
  • From the TS.Census CD (manual installation)
  • Via email with a web link
  • Via an intranet

Q. How do I recreate a Collection Server after rebuilding a machine?
A. Follow these steps:

  1. (Optional) In the TS.Census Asset Inventory Manager, rename the original Collection Server. This will allow you to use the original name when installing the new Collection Server.
  2. Install a Collection Server on the machine.
  3. In the Manager, reassign the machine from the old name to the new name. (Note: This is not necessary if the machine on which you are installing the Collection Server has the same name as the old machine.)
  4. In the Manager, delete the name of the old Collection Server.

As soon as the Collection Server is available, the clients will start connecting. You can see which clients are reassigning themselves by doing a count on a Workstation query filtered on Collection Server name. If the Override option was set when the schedule was specified, the clients will start a Collection.

Q. How can I restore the original GUID after imaging a workstation?
A. TS.Census Asset Inventory has a Recover workstation feature. The Recover process creates a .REG file that must be executed on the workstation in question. The .REG file contains the GUID. The next time a Collection is run, the scan information will be loaded as an existing configuration and will not take a new license.

Q. On our remote workstation, we want the Collection Client to check only once to see if a Collection is due to run. How do we configure this?
A. Check the General tab in the Collection Option Set and make sure that the option Run Collection Client in Resident Mode is NOT selected. With this option disabled, the Collection Client will start when a user logs on to the workstation and check with its host to see if a Collection is due to run. If it is time for a Collection to run, a Collection will start. If a scan is not due, then the Collection Client will exit.

Q. I have a remote workstation on which I need to install a Collection Server. How can I do that?
A. Use a remote control application to access a remote machine on which you wish to install a Collection Server, Task Server, or the Manager.

Q. Why do some recognized software applications have an *n designation at the end of the product name?
A. The *n designation indicates the presence of a specific manufacturer-provided patch with names that were too long to augment the existing product's version number and were arbitrarily abbreviated with an asterisk. Please check the manufacturer's websites to obtain details about the individual patches. Select the following link to view a list of patched software applications that falls into this category and lists the name of the patch (patches.txt). TS.Census Asset Inventory recognizes many patches that have abbreviated names that are not included in this list (i.e. Microsoft Word 97 8.0 SR-2).

Q. Where are the error logs for the various TS.Census Asset Inventory modules stored?
A. Error logs are stored in the 'logs' folder under the installation directory (except the Collection Client logs which are stored in the 'bin' folder on the machine on which the client was installed.)

All log files are named according to the module from which they were generated followed by the date on which the error occurred. For example, a Manager log created on March 18, 2003, would be named TSCMgrEvent20030318.log.

Tip: To generate more detailed logs for diagnostic purposes, edit the registry on the appropriate workstation as follows:

  1. Locate the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Tally Systems Corp.\TSCensus
  2. Under the key for the appropriate module, create a new key called Debugging.
  3. Under the Debugging key create a new DWORD value called LogLevel.
  4. Assign 1 to this value for maximum logging

Software Usage Monitoring

Q. Will I be able to identify software that is installed but not used so I can uninstall it and reduce my license needs?
A. Absolutely. The TS.Census Usage Module identifies and locates software that is not being used.

Q. Can I monitor local products—those that I've added to the TS.Census recognition database?
A. Yes. The Usage Module can also identify used, and unused, local product installations.

Q. Does the Usage Module require a database separate from TS.Census?
A. No. Usage data is sent to the TS.Census database for reporting, which allows analysis of what is installed and what is actually used.

Q. Can I monitor server-based applications?
A. Yes, the Usage Module monitors applications run from a network share in native Windows.

Q. Does the usage module only monitor active applications?
A. No. The Usage Module monitors applications that are active or in the background.

Q. Can I tell what user is using which applications on a multi-user PC?
A. Yes. User-by-user monitoring assigns usage to a person to track patterns on multi-user PCs.

Software License Compliance

Q. Can software license compliance be configured to audit FNI products?
A. The Software Compliance Module will allow you to reconcile and report on local products created from FNI data but will not include all FNI data. This is due to the large number of FNI files and the fact that many do not correspond to products that need to be tracked from a licensing perspective.

Q. The Software Compliance Module is web-based. Is there any code that must reside on the client PC?
A. There is an agent that resides on the client. The agent is approximately 2.5 MB and runs as a service.

Q. How is purchasing data brought into the Software Compliance Module?
A. Purchasing information can be imported from a text file or manually entered.

Q. What is a Reseller Connector?
A. Using a Reseller Connector, you’ll directly download and import TS.Census License Compliance Suite reports from your reseller’s website. The Software Compliance Module currently supports SHI customers with the TS.Census License Compliance Report, and SoftChoice customers with the Product History Report.

Q. Can I see which user actually has a particular license?
A. The software compliance reports allow you to “drill down? to the PCs that have licensed software installed.

Q. How will the Software Compliance Module avoid software version duplications (e.g. Office Word version 9.0, and 9.0 SR1, etc.)?
A. For this example, the Software Compliance Module will report Word 9.0 and Word 9.0 SR 1 as Word 2000.

Q. OEMed software can be a problem in tracking software license compliance. How are OEMed versions handled?
A. Some software vendors embed the "OEM" string inside the serial number. This information can be isolated and reported within TS.Census Asset Inventory.

Q. What if a PC has a product installed in different directories? Would one or more of the installations be excluded from the license count?
A. The Software Compliance Module counts unique versions of software on any particular PC. So, if the same version of the same product is installed in two places on the PC, it would be reported just once in the Software Compliance Module. Inventory reports in TS.Census Asset Inventory would show both installations.

Q. Can the Software Compliance Module be sold separately?
A. No, it requires a TS.Census Asset Inventory installation.

Network Discovery

Q. How does the Network Discovery engine communicate with the TS.Census Asset Inventory client? Does it communicate via a specific port?
A. We attempt to communicate over the default port (7461) as well as any other port the client is known to connect through. (The collection server records in the database the port each client uses to connect, so we read that table and generate a distinct list of ports to try.)

Q. How are network devices reconciled on subsequent scans?
A. For devices that have been identified as a specific Type (i.e. Printer, Router, Hub) we retrieve all the devices that match the System Object ID. If the primary MAC address or serial number does not match the device, the device is not reconciled and it is inserted into the database as a newly discovered device. Otherwise the device is reconciled with the device matching the most information.

For devices that we weren't able to identify the Type (i.e. "Other Ungrouped"), we retrieve all devices matching the IP Address, the MAC Address, or the DNS Name. The device is reconciled to the one matching the most information correctly.

Q. What are the 7 "System" fields that a Network Discovery scan will capture from an SNMP-enabled device?
A. The fields are:

  • Name
    Name of the device (by convention this is the fully qualified domain name entered by the Administrator)
  • Description
    Description of the device (provided by vendor)
  • Object ID
    Unique identifier of the device (provided by the vendor)
  • UpTime
    The time in hundredths of a second since the network management portion of the entity was last reinitialized.
  • Contact
    Name of the device contact (entered by Administrator)
  • SysLocation
    Location of the device (entered by Administrator)
  • Services
    A value that indicates the set of services that this device primarily offers

Q. Does network printer discovery recognize the jet direct box or does it recognize the attached printer?
A. It recognizes the attached printer, and the system description will contain information about jet direct.

Q. Can printers be tracked by MAC address?
A. Yes, the Network Discovery Engine captures MAC addresses for printers.

Q. Yes, the Network Discovery Engine captures MAC addresses for printers. Can we track network devices on just a portion of the network?
A. Yes. You can configure the module to run on any portion of your network.

Q. If I don't have Web Reports, can I still do a network discovery to find out which clients do not have TS.Census Asset Inventory?
A. The Web Console is required to query and report on network discovery data. Alternatively, you could query the database directly using SQL Enterprise Manager or other database query tools.

Q. Does each network device discovered take a license seat?
A. No. The Network Discovery Engine is included with TS.Census Asset Inventory. Network devices are not counted individually against license limit.

Q. How does the Network Discovery Engine handle servers with multiple IP addresses?
A. A network device with multiple IP addresses will reconcile to a single device based on the information available of the device itself. Serial numbers and MAC addresses are the most reliable data sources for data reconciliation.

Q. How do you discover an unmanaged HUB?
A. The base level requirement for device discovery is an IP address.

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