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Version 6.30
Version 6.30
  • Welcome
  • Nexthink V6
  • Overview
    • Software components
    • Collector
    • Finder
    • Engine
    • Portal
    • Nexthink Library
    • Digital Experience Score
  • Installation and configuration
    • Planning your installation
      • Overview of the installation process
      • Hardware requirements
      • Connectivity requirements
      • Software requirements
      • Reference architectures
    • Installing Portal and Engine Appliances
      • Installing the Appliance
      • Installing the Appliance on Azure
      • Installing the Appliance on AWS
      • Installing the Appliance on OTC
      • Managing Appliance accounts
      • Setting the names of the Portal
      • Setting the names of the Engines
      • Specifying your internal networks and domains
      • Federating your Appliances
      • STIG compliance in Web Console
      • Connecting the Portal to the Engines
      • Configuring session performance storage
      • Configuring device performance storage
      • Setting up a software license
      • Sending email notifications from the Appliance
      • Allocating resources for the Portal
    • Installing the Collector
      • Installing the Collector on Windows
      • Installing the Collector on macOS
      • Installing the Collector for a Proof of Value
      • Assigning Collectors to Engines
      • Assignment of roaming Collectors
      • Collector MSI parameters reference table
      • Nxtcfg - Collector configuration tool
      • Inspecting the connection status of the Collector
      • Querying the status of the TCP connection of the Collector
      • Reporting the URL of HTTP web requests
      • Auditing logon events
      • Viewing user interactions in virtualized and embedded environments
      • Engage notifications on macOS
      • Configuring Collector level anonymization
    • Collector remote connectivity
      • Redirecting and anonymizing Collector traffic
      • Redirecting the Collector TCP channel
      • Support for DirectAccess
      • Windows Collector proxy support
      • Mac Collector proxy support
    • Installing the Event Connector
      • Installing the Event Connector on Linux
    • Installing the Finder
      • Installing the Finder on Windows
      • Enabling Cross-Engine Finder features
      • Expanding the time frame of investigations in the Finder
      • Enabling Finder access to the Library
      • Finder proxy support
    • Updating from V6.x
      • Updating the Appliance
      • Content centralization when updating the Appliance
      • Updating the Collector
      • Viewing Collector deprecated fields
      • Updating the Finder
    • Security and user account management
      • Importing and replacing certificates
      • Hierarchizing your infrastructure
      • Adding users
      • Enabling SAML authentication of users
      • Just-In-Time provisioning of user accounts
      • Enabling Windows authentication of users
      • Multi-factor authentication for local accounts overview
      • Provisioning user accounts from Active Directory
      • Establishing a privacy policy
      • Disabling local accounts for interactive users
      • Setting the complexity and minimum length of passwords for local accounts
      • Protecting local accounts against brute force attacks
      • Preventing password saving in the Finder
      • Controlling session timeouts in the Portal
      • Security settings in the Appliance
      • Setting the Do Not Disturb periods between campaigns
    • Data retrieval and storage
      • Data retention
      • Increasing the maximum number of metrics
      • Establishing a data retention policy in the Engine
      • Storing Engine data in a secondary disk drive
      • Importing data from Microsoft Active Directory
      • Setting the locale in the Portal
      • Changing the Time Zone of the Portal
      • Time Zones and data collection
      • Changing the data collection time of the Portal
      • Nightly task schedules timetable
      • Changing the thresholds of High CPU warnings
      • Automatic restart of unresponsive Engine
    • Maintenance operations
      • Logging in to the CLI
      • Special operation modes for the Engine and the Portal
      • Changing the default ports in the Appliance
      • Centralized Management of Appliances and Engines
      • Monitoring the performance of the Appliance
      • Resizing partitions in Appliance
      • Configuring the system log
      • Examining the logs in the Portal
      • GDPR - Retrieving or anonymizing personal data
      • Finding out unlicensed devices
      • Removing devices
      • Installing third-party software in the Appliance
      • Installing VMware Tools in the Appliance
      • Operational data sent to Nexthink
      • Sending additional data to Support
    • Disaster recovery
      • Planning for disaster recovery
      • Web Console backup and restore
      • Engine backup and restore
      • Portal backup and restore
      • Rule-based assignment backup and restore
      • License backup and restore
      • PKI backup and restore
    • Branding
      • Branding the Portal
      • Branding of campaigns
  • User manual
    • Getting started
      • Logging in to the Finder
      • Logging in to the Portal
      • Enabling STIG in Webconsole
    • Querying the system
      • Searching the subject of interest
      • Executing an investigation
      • Creating an investigation
      • Editing the options of an investigation
      • Combining logical conditions in investigations
      • Navigating through the results of an investigation
      • Properties of users and devices
    • Visualizing system activity in the Finder
      • Getting a quick overview
      • Graphically observing the activity of users and devices
      • Observing service performance
      • Viewing network connections
      • Viewing web requests
      • Viewing executions
    • Monitoring IT custom metrics
      • Creating a metric
      • Examples of metrics
      • Session performance
      • Device performance
      • Following the evolution of a metric
      • Finding the visuals of a metric
    • Monitoring IT services
      • Analyzing service quality
      • Creating a service
      • Following the evolution of a service
      • Specifying URL paths of web-based services
    • Engaging with the end user
      • Getting feedback from the end users
      • Types of campaigns
      • Creating a campaign
      • Editing a campaign
      • Types of questions
      • Controlling the flow of questions
      • Translating a campaign
      • Triggering a campaign manually
      • Limiting the reception rate of campaigns
      • Scrutinizing the results of a campaign
      • Continuously measuring the satisfaction of employees
    • Rating devices and users with scores
      • Computing scores
      • Creating a score
      • Checking and comparing ratings
      • Computing potential savings
      • Score XML Reference
      • Documenting scores
    • Remotely acting on devices
      • Scenarios for remote actions
      • Creating a remote action
      • Executing remote actions
      • Triggering a remote action manually
      • Writing scripts for remote actions on Windows
      • Writing scripts for remote actions on Mac
      • Example of self-healing scenario
      • Example of self-help scenario
      • Application control and remote actions
    • Organizing objects with categories
      • Classifying objects of the same type
      • Creating categories and keywords
      • Tagging objects manually
      • Tagging objects automatically
      • Importing tags from text files
    • Getting notified by the system
      • Receiving Engage campaigns
      • Receiving email digests
      • Receiving alerts
      • Creating a service-based alert
      • Creating an investigation-based alert
    • Building web-based dashboards
      • Introducing dashboards in the Portal
      • Creating a dashboard
      • Examining metrics in depth
      • Documenting dashboards
      • Assessing license use
      • Computing dashboard data
      • Reusing dashboard content
    • Importing and exporting authored content
      • Methods for reusing authored content
      • Manually sharing Finder content
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  • Library packs
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    • Configuration Manuals
      • Overview (Configuration Manuals)
      • Installing A New Version Of A Library Pack
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    • Device management
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    • Remote Employee Experience
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    • Persona Insight
      • Persona Insight - Overview
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      • Persona Insight - Getting Started and Upgrade Procedure
      • Persona Insight - Configuration Guide
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      • Persona Insight - Reference Guide
      • Persona Insight - Example Pack
      • Persona Insight - Device Sizing
        • Persona Insight - Device Sizing Overview
        • Persona Insight - Device Sizing Configuration
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        • Persona Insight - Application Sizing Overview
        • Persona Insight - Application Sizing Configuration
      • Legacy Persona documentation
        • Persona Insight - Library Pack (V.1.0.0.0)
        • Persona Insight - Base Pack
        • Persona Insight - Base Pack Advanced
        • Persona Insight - Customization Guide (V1.0.0.0)
        • Persona Insight - Configuration Guide (V1.0.0.0)
        • Persona Insight - Reference Guide (V1.0.0.0)
    • GSuite
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    • Windows
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        • MS ConfigMgr - Client Health - Summary
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  • Integrations
    • Nexthink ServiceNow Service Graph Connector
      • Overview
        • Roles and Permissions
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      • Installation and Configuration Guide
        • Pre-requisites
          • Configure Identification Rules
          • Import and setup the CMDB categories in Finder
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      • FAQ
        • Why ServiceNow Service Graph Connector?
        • What about Nexthink CMDB Connector?
        • Why is the name the primary key for the devices?
      • Troubleshooting
        • IRE identification issues
          • [No Choice found in the sys_choice table for the target table](integrations/nexthink-servicenow-service-graph-connector/troubleshooting/ire-identification-issues/ no-choice-found-in-the-sys_choice-table-for-the-target-table.md)
          • Identification rules not created
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        • Timeout Errors
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        • MID server issues
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          • Not trusted certificates in Quebec release
        • Configure credentials issues
          • [Not allowing update of property authentication_choice](integrations/nexthink-servicenow-service-graph-connector/troubleshooting/configure-credentials-issues/ not-allowing-update-of-property-authentication_choice.md)
          • Invalid username/password combo (HTTP 401/403)
        • Configure Engines Issues
          • [The client secret supplied for a confidential client is invalid](integrations/nexthink-servicenow-service-graph-connector/troubleshooting/configure-engines-issues/ the-client-secret-supplied-for-a-confidential-client-is-invalid.md)
        • No Cis imported and no errors found in the log
    • Nexthink ServiceNow Incident Management Connector (IMC)
      • Installation and configuration guide (IMC)
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    • Search and information display
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      • Top results of Cross-Engine investigations
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    • References
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On this page
  • Overview
  • The centralization process
  • Merge strategies
  • Status of alerts
  • Monitoring the centralization process

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  1. Installation and configuration
  2. Updating from V6.x

Content centralization when updating the Appliance

Last updated 10 months ago

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Overview

When updating the Appliance to V6.17 or later from a previous version of Nexthink, a set of elements that were previously local to each Engine become centralized:

  • Investigations

  • One-click investigations

  • Investigation-based alerts

    • My alerts

    • Global alerts

The centralization of content offers users a unified experience with the Finder across all Engines. Users find their own set of investigations and alerts no matter the Engine to which they connect from the Finder, without having to manually replicate their content on every Engine. Therefore, centralization specially benefits Finder users that work in a multi-Engine setup. For Finder users that work in a single-Engine setup, the user experience remains the same after centralization.

The centralization process

Centralization takes place automatically during the upgrade of the Appliance to V6.17 or later. As usual, the Appliance that runs the Portal gets upgraded first. Subsequently, each Engine gets upgraded. As soon as an Engine restarts, it tries to reconnect to the Portal. When an upgraded Engine re-establishes connection with the Portal, the Portal retrieves the content to be centralized from the Engine. As other Engines connect in turn, their content is added to the Portal. For its part, the Portal sends a replica of the centralized content to all the already connected Engines. In case of the presence of duplicated or similar content in more than one Engine before centralization, the Portal adopts different merge strategies that are discussed below.

At the end of the process, all Engines are synchronized with respect to user-defined content. The same user sees therefore the same content regardless of the Engine to which the Finder is connected. However, different users may see different content. Only the owner (the creator) of an investigation, a one-click, or a user-specific alert is .

Centralization runs to completion in around one minute for large multi-Engine setups. Measurements in test environments indicate a duration of the centralization process of approximately 15 seconds for a setup with 20 Engines, 100 users and 2 000 items to centralize. Note however that this duration highly depends in the quantity of total content to centralize and, specially, in the quality of the connection between Portal and Engines. If for any reason an Engine is disconnected from the Portal, its content will not be centralized until it is connected back again.

Merge strategies

Some of the content to be centralized may reside in more than one Engine because a user recreated or copied it to several Engines. Besides, part of the copied items may have been modified in a few Engines. For instance, the definition of an investigation in one Engine may be different from the definition of a similar investigation with the same name in another Engine, because the time frame, conditions, or display fields were changed.

Thus, centralization classifies similar items according to three criteria:

  • The folder path where the items are located in the Finder.

  • The name given to the items.

  • The definition of the items.

Based on the previous criteria, centralization considers three cases for merging repeated or similar content:

Real duplicates

Items that are located in the same folder, share the same name, and have the same definition.

False duplicates

Items that are located in the same folder, share the same name, but have a different definition.

Rest of items

Items that do not fall into any of the two previous categories.

Let us illustrate how the different centralization strategies work with an example that covers the three cases. Although the example features the tree of investigations of a user in two different Engines, the principles described equally apply to trees of one-clicks and alerts and to setups with more than two Engines.

Real duplicates

Real duplicates are merged into a single item during centralization. Here, Investigation 2 is found in Folder A in the tree of investigations of both Engine 1 and Engine 2, and we assume that the investigation holds the same definition in both Engines.

False duplicates

False duplicates are detected during centralization and copied into a separate subfolder. In the example, we find Investigation 1 in Folder A of the tree of investigations in both Engine 1 and Engine 2, but the definition of this investigation is different on each Engine. From the screen capture of the example itself, we can deduce that Investigation 1 on Engine 1 is different from Investigation 1 on Engine 2 because of their associated icon: while the former is an investigation on devices, the latter is an investigation on users. They just happen to be located in the same folder and have the same name.

Assuming that the content of Engine 1 was centralized first, Investigation 1 from Engine 1 is placed directly into Folder A of the merged investigation tree. On the other hand, because of the path and name collision, Investigation 1 from Engine 2 is copied to a subfolder Engine 2 within Folder A, as depicted in the figure.

Rest of items

Items that do not collide in name and folder path simultaneously are just copied with their own name to the same location in the merged investigation tree as they had in their original Engine before centralization.

Status of alerts

To enable a replicated alert on a particular Engine:

  1. Log in to the Finder.

    1. Connect to the specific Engine on logon.

  2. Go to the Settings section on the left-hand side accordion of the main window.

  3. Choose the type of alerts to see from the drop-down list:

    • Select Global alerts to see the alerts that are global to all users (only users with the right permissions can manage global alerts).

    • Select My alerts to see the alerts that are specific to your user account.

  4. Right-click the name of the alert and select Enable on current Engine.

Remember that enabling an alert will fail if the limit of enabled alerts has been reached on that Engine.

Monitoring the centralization process

Following the centralization from the Portal

To follow the centralization process from the Portal:

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

  2. Click the ADMINISTRATION drop-down menu at the top of the window.

  3. Select the Engines dashboard.

  4. Look at the status line at the bottom of the table with the list of connected Engines.

The status line holds a list of the Engines for which centralization is still pending:

Troubleshooting centralization

If the centralization process is unable to complete in an Engine, the Portal displays the following message in the status line:

  • Content centralization failed for the following N Engine(s):

To retry the centralization process on an Engine where it failed:

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

  2. Click the ADMINISTRATION drop-down menu at the top of the window.

  3. Select the Engines dashboard.

  4. Click the chain icon to disconnect the failed Engine from the Portal.

    1. Wait until the connection status light turns red.

  5. Click again the chain icon to connect back the Engine to the Portal.

    1. Wait for the Portal to attempt the centralization again.

If the problem persists, please contact Nexthink Support.

Logging in to the Finder during upgrade

As explained above, centralization is a fast process. However, in the unlikely event that a user tries to log in to the Finder while the centralization procedure is going on, the Finder displays the following message to ask the user to log in later:


RELATED TASKS

Because centralization gathers alerts from all connected Engines, each Engine ends up with the same or more investigation-based alerts than it had before upgrading. To avoid exceeding the during upgrade, alerts stay enabled only on the Engines where they were originally enabled. That is, the definition of alerts are replicated on all Engines, but not their status. Thus, alerts that appear on an Engine as a result of the centralization process are disabled by default. This is valid both for global alerts and for user-specific alerts (those in the section My alerts of each user). Similarly, newly created alerts are only enabled on the Engines in which they are created.

able to see it and manage it from the Finder
Creating an investigation-based alert
Local and shared content
limit of enabled alerts per Engine