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Tracking thin clients lifecycle

As a healthcare company who heavily uses Citrix to deliver end user applications, we have deployed nearly 500 mobile and desktop thin clients. Thin clients are great for IT support teams because the easy deployment and greatly reduced on-going maintenance. Because we use the ThinOS (Linux) based devices, we never had to worry about Windows patching on those endpoints. We centrally update any device firmware/bios updates via the network. At any rate, the only method of tracking these devices in SWSD inventory is to manually add them as computers. This allows us to attach them to incidents/changes, etc. but the lifecycle information is not dynamically tracked.  Consequently, in reviewing equipment for refresh, it's nearly impossible to track how old these devices are. 

I don't know for a fact, but is it possible that the agentless network scan method of ingesting inventory would provide more dynamic data?

Appreciate the consideration and if this will require it, a nice firm up vote. 

Regards,

Drew Haege

IT Director

Nashville, TN

Parents
  • Hi , your use case is one that we are seeing more and more and have found the Discovery Scanner, the agentless network scanner, should resolve your issue. As long as the thin clients are spun up and keep the same key identifiers (serial number and or Mac address), then we should be able to keep them up-to-date in SWSD. You can read more about the scanner and the methods we support here.

  • Joey,

    Obviously, I didn't see your response earlier.  So, i guess the question I would have in response to the scanner option is would it actually recognize "last time online" somehow?   

    Drew

Reply Children
  • Drew,

    The scanner is not able to see the last time the device was online but you could run a report, in SWSD, to see devices that haven't been updated in X amount of days. This should give you a good idea of which devices haven't been online since they were pinged again.