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Centralized Management of Appliances and Engines

Overview

The Centralized Management solution lets central administrators perform selected management actions on connected Appliances from the Portal. The solution also lets you get information from the Engines running on the connected Appliances, as well as perform some maintenance actions on them. This avoids the need to connect individually to each Appliance via the Web Console for performing commonplace management actions.

Centralized Appliance Management

Enable Appliance for centralized management

To enable the centralized management of an Appliance:

  1. Log in to the Web Console of the Appliance to be centrally managed.

  2. Click the Appliance tab at the top of the window.

  3. Select the section Accounts from the left-hand side menu.

  4. Under Portal remote management account, tick the box Enable Portal remote management account.

  5. Type in twice the password to manage the Appliance from the Portal. If no value is entered, the default password is api.

Adding an Appliance for centralized management

To add a new Appliance to centralized management in the Portal:

  1. Log in to the Portal as a central administrator.

  2. In the ADMINISTRATION top menu, select the Appliances dashboard under the section SYSTEM CONFIGURATION.

  3. In the Appliances section, click on the plus icon.

  4. Enter the Appliance NameAddressPort, the Remote management password and Description. Note that in the Address field, one should enter either the IP address or the DNS name in order to match what was entered in the Address field of the Engines dashboard in the Nexthink Portal section (refer to Connecting the Portal to the Engines). Validate your entry to add the Appliance to the centralized management.

Central configuration of Appliances

Select the Appliances to configure and press on the configuration icon. You have several configuration options:

Enable Web Console

Allow the connection of users to the Web Console in the Appliance.

Disable Web Console

Prevent users from connecting to the Web Console in the Appliance.

Configure NTP

Nexthink synchronizes with NTP servers using the Network Time Protocol. Enter the list of NTP server addresses seperated by a space. One option is to use the NTP servers offered by http://www.pool.ntp.org/en/, such as 0.pool.ntp.org, etc.

Reboot

Reboot the machine that hosts the Appliance.

Add or remove Engines related to an Appliance

  1. Click on the information icon corresponding to the Appliance of interest.

  2. Click on the chain icon to start or stop the central management of an Engine. If the central management is started, the Engine will show up in the Engines section of the Appliances dashboard.

Edit or remove an Appliance from centralized management

  • To edit an Appliance, click on the corresponding pencil icon

  • To delete an Appliance, click on the corresponding trashcan icon

Centralized Engine Management

The Engines section shows the Engines associated to the Appliances managed centrally. Select the Engine to configure and press on the configuration icon. You have several configuration options:

Configure LDAP

Set up your LDAP servers to get Active Directory information for Nexthink objects.

Information

Displays a table with the different configuration settings and general information about the Engine.

Refresh DNS

Use this option to refresh DNS information on the Engine. This can be necessary if you wish to reflect changes on a DNS server (configuration changes or updates in the resolution of a particular destination). The Engine resolves new Destinations, but it does not refresh their DNS automatically if it changes.

Refresh LDAP

This option is generally used in a scenario where the LDAP server integration is performed after Engine installation. In this case, launch this option to trigger the Engine refresh of its LDAP information. The Engine gets information from the configured LDAP servers on every new user detected.

Restart

Stop and restart the Engine. Note that restarting the Engine results in a temporal loss of data received from Collectors during the time of starting up.


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