Hear you and welcome back now in today's video, we will be discussing about the systems manager inventory
now at a high level overview, the systems manager inventory provides the visibility into your EC2 instance
and your on premise computing environment.
So let's say that there are 100 servers that are running now.
You want to fetch various information related to water, the application packages that are installed
in those servers.
What is the network configuration in those servers?
What is maybe the Windows Registry or what are the services that are running?
What are the files that are available and so many others?
So if you want to fetch this information, you need a centralized software that can go ahead and query
all of these servers.
And that is what their inventory allows us to do.
So at a high level or good, this can be understood with the diagram where you have the system inventory
and you also had the item that is installed on all of that server.
Now, considering that the agent is installed, the system inventory can go ahead and query the agent
to fetch certain information, like what are the application packages that are installed?
What are the ICSI based files that are available in this specific instance and so on?
So considering you have architecture, let's say tomorrow administrator user wants to see if antivirus
agent is installed on all of those servers.
He can simply run this query to the inventory so he can see the inventory is antivirus agent installing
all of the servers or and what his agent is installing, which said it was so intense his home inventory
will look into its database and it will inform the administrator user maybe see antivirus agent is installing
easy one, but it is not installed and easy to do so.
This gives administrator a great insight into the improvement areas in the infrastructure.
So that's the basics about inventory.
Let's quickly look into it now, currently within the systems manager console.
In fact, I already have inventory enabled for today's demo, and this is how things would really look
like now.
If you look into the inventory coverage by Typekit, a lot of things that you can do like, you can
look into the applications the dabblers file, the network related information service information.
If you are on windows, then you can look into Windows Roll, Windows Registry, Windows Update and
so on.
And on top of that, it basically gives you various things like Don't fight always audience.
Now, since I already have one easy to insist, it is just showing that you have Amazon Linux two.
And on top of that, it also shows you the top five applications packages that are available on the
specific operating system version.
So this is one part.
Now let's quickly go to the state manager where we can look into the exact inventory data and within,
you know, you have an association, the status you will see this field.
That is fine, primarily because I have stopped the easy to instance.
So let's quickly open this up and let's quickly look into the resources.
So within the resource, it shows you the intensity.
And now it basically gives you the instance of what we related to, what exactly the instance details
like basis, image and IP address, and so on.
Now on top of that, if you'll go to the inventory audio, this is where things become interesting.
So you see you get the exact details related to various packages that are installed on top of the server.
So similar to what we were discussing, if you want to see if antivirus agent is installed in all of
those servers, for that information to be queried upon you first need to see the packages that are
available.
So this is one thing that you can also do.
And along with that in the inventory type, you can search for various other information.
Let's say you want to look into the network information.
So this will give you the interface, the Mac address, the IP address, as well as the IPv6 related
information.
And similar to that, depending upon the data that is being collected by the inventory, you can go
ahead and query that data from you.
Now we were discussing that Wednesday inventory database is collected.
How can you go ahead and query a specific use case?
Let's look into it.
So currently, I have one easy instance, and the inventory data is already collected.
So from the inventory service, you can go ahead and filter things.
So let's see.
I want to say that let's see the application name equals two.
You can specify, let's say, anti-virus agent and from you basically see all the information.
So currently, there is no you see two instance which has this application name.
So you are not the corresponding manager instance.
You see no manager instance phone matching the filter idea.
This is fine.
So now let's do one thing.
Let's go ahead and look into the application that is already available.
So you have too.
So let's go ahead and try down.
So let's run our query again.
I'll say equals to c e to let me press enter.
And yes, now it seems that there is a result.
Let's look into that is.
And within the marriage instance, you see, we're able to see that instance 80.
That's great.
So I hope with this, you understood at a high level what we what the ISM inventory does.
Now, I still remember in one of the organization that I was working with earlier.
We used to have our own tool that could perform all of these queries, which are the applications that
are installed.
What is the version number of that application?
So if you'll see audit, it basically not only gives you the application name, it also gives you the
version number.
And this is quite useful in lot of use cases.
So we used to have a tool that could do that.
Now, in fact, let me quickly show you that.
So the name of the tool was spacewalk space was an amazing badge management solution, and one of the
not so good things is that it wasn't discontinued.
Now, one of the challenges that you will see is that if you use various projects like Spacewalk, although
it works perfectly well, it can do patching.
It can go ahead and query the various packages that are available in the easy two and so on.
But in case, if the project gets discontinued, then you are in trouble.
Now is the time when I was working in that organization.
Spacewalk was actively developed, but at a later stage it got discontinued.
So I remember my managers, Goldenvoice.
He always says that if your infrastructure is in a specific cloud provider, let's assume it is.
And if there are any services that can perform a specific use case, and if there are equivalent or
maybe a little better projects that are available in the market always prefer the EAW services.
You will know that it will not really deprecate those services.
And in case if there are any issues, you have A.W. steam that can help you.
So he always focuses on the EWR side of things already.
So at that time when spacewalk was implemented, inventory was not really present, so we had made use
of space.
So I hope that organization has now implemented inventory and various other features to implement the
patch management in the easy two instances in the organization.
Now, one more important thing that you need to note is that you can go ahead and centralized all the
findings.
So whatever findings that we have seen, you can store it in the S3 bucket and from the S3 bucket using
some external tools.
Maybe Athena, you can go ahead and but from the query on the S3 bucket itself.
So let's say that you are seconds now.
You will not really go to all of the 100 eatables are going to go to the state manager, look into the
instance ID to see what the application that data will be, but instead what you will do.
You'll centralize all of the detainees three bucket and the S3 bucket is what you will be caring for.
So this is also something that can be done.
So that's the high level overview about inventory, and with this will conclude today's video.