ID: 12392
Title: HW/SW Inventory: Single values or table columns can be kept longer than their
validity period
Component: HW/SW Inventory
Level: 1
Class: New feature
Version: 2.1.0i1
The {{mk_inventory}} agent plugin collects static data like BIOS settings,
information about the operation system, installed packages and others. The
collected data has a validity period and will be removed if no new data is
provided by the plugin.
Hosts or applications may be down or unreachable due to maintenance work and do
not provide data anymore. Such situations lead to empty tree entries.
In order to counteract such situations single values or table columns can be
kept longer than their validity period from the previous tree via the ruleset
{{Retention intervals for HW/SW inventory entities}}.
One advantage is that tree entries are not missing in reports.
If the host provides data again the new data is used, of course.
The retention information about how long single values or table columns are
kept is displayed behind the single value keys resp. in the headers of the
table columns.
Retention intervals will be removed completely if there is no ruleset
{{Retention intervals for HW/SW inventory entities}} anymore.
<b>Example:</b>
Assume the fields {{hardware.memory::total_ram_usable}} and
{{networking.interfaces::index}} are currently not contained in the agent
data, and their validity periods are expired.
If there are retention intervals configured for these fields, they will not
dissappear from the inventory, but their respective headers display
{{Total usable RAM (x left)}} and {{Index (y left)}}.
If the retention intervals are expired the headers show {{Total usable RAM (outdated)}}
resp. {{Index (outdated)}}.
<b>Note:</b>
This feature is only available for inventory plugins programed against
the new API: If you want to keep table columns we must know which columns
identify a row. This information is not available for legacy inventory
plugins, which would lead to unexpected, incomprehensible and non-transparent
results regarding the inventory history, filtering or merging other trees.
This means that you have to migrate legacy inventory plugins to the new API
which generate TableRows (or Attributes).
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