Habitat 3rd Party Application Management

Detailed descriptions and imagery explaining each tool available inside Habitat. Feel free to post feature requests under each tools forum post if you would like to see something added or changed in the tools.
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Cubert
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Habitat 3rd Party Application Management

Post by Cubert »

Habitat automates the entire process for pre-installed application management. It will seek out enabled agents and reviews their installed software. If it finds a matching software is will setup the association and start updating the software as newer packages are available. A MSP can, in minutes, have thousands of agents managing the updates of hundreds of software titles. That's it nothing to deploy! Nothing to configure! No files to mess with, install it and it just works.

Habitat runs an automation service in the background of Automate that regularly checks for clients to be enable or disabled, new applications to be reported from the agents of the client enabled and any retired agents that no longer need to have data kept on them removed. The tool reviews the installed software list maintained by Automate for each enabled agent and if it has an associated update package set for it Habitat will add that software to management. Habitat regularly goes and checks the repository versions to see what the latest available versions are. It then looks at the installed versions shown by agent and if the are not the same version then Habitat starts the upgrade process on that software. The results can be seen in the Client consoles of each client in Automate.


Console to manage software package associations.

Use this console to create "Searches" for software titles to associate with repository packages available from Chocolatey.org We have provided a handful of commonly used software that you can enable or disable by selecting to "Update" a given search item. When matching new software titles you can use the (%) symbol as a wildcard to help define different software titles and repository packages.

When selecting a search from the list you will automatically populate the (Apps Effected/Agents Effected) list with any agent or software title that may be effected by search. By clicking "Apps Effected" or clicking "Agents Effected" counters you can switch the view between agents and software views. This allows you to pre test your search and if needed refine your search to produce the list of software to be effected by updates.

Scan Speed sets how often the automation runs to update internal scans or push any available updates during each day.
Delay setting is used to place a (X) minute delay between each agents scheduled updates. This is used to help spread out the script schedule across a client so all agents are not trying to update at once and thus causing Chocolatey repo lockouts.


Appmanager1.PNG
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Client console to manage agents.

You will start here to enable and disable the automation in this tool. Each client can have either Desktops/Laptops or Servers updated or both by selecting the appropriate checkboxes. Once enabled the list of Enabled Agents will populate. Selecting the "Rescan Agents" button will force a scan of each agent and any searches that fins software will be applied to agent. Applications found by the scans will appear in the Managed Applications list for any agent that has scanned and search matches were made. You can right click and enabled agent and force an update of software to execute immediately.

AppmanagerClientConsole.PNG
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There are 4 places inside the plugin where you can disable the auto updates.
  • Disable the App Search for items in main view
  • Disable the entire location via EDF at location level
  • Disable an agent from all updates
  • Disable a single Application for an agent.
Snail Scheduler
AppmanagerClientConsole-snail.PNG
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The Snail Scheduler works in conjunction with the Turtle and Rabbit. The Turtle and Rabbit settings controls the number of times per day the automation runs and the snail settings sets clients individual settings This allows you to control how often automation runs on your agents at a per week or per month level. By default snail mode is disabled and only Rabbit or Turtle will effect scheduling.



An agent getting scanned and Google Chrome found...

During the scans an agent logs any applications it finds that searches have matched up. Once in the Managed Packages list Habitat will start updating the software.


SettingupPackageUpdate.PNG
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Automation logs
You can find the automation logs for this tool on the Automate host at C:\Program Files\LabTech\Logs or by using the Habitat Sever plugin log reader tool . (see image)

Plugin logs for App manager.PNG
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Last edited by Cubert on Fri Oct 01, 2021 3:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: We have a new Application Manager Tool. Starting a new Post.

cires316
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Re: Habitat 3rd Party Application Management

Post by cires316 »

Do you have to pay for the app-genie plugin for this to work? I enabled workstations at a few clients but no apps show up under them under managed applications

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Cubert
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Re: Habitat 3rd Party Application Management

Post by Cubert »

Nope it's all inclusive of Habitat.

Start a new thread on the Habitat forum with your issue and we will get started looking at your issue. Post images and logs if any so we can see what's going on. Also post from "Server plugin Logs" the Habitat logs so we can see if Habitat is working that function.

Thanks

Cubert

JvdMaat
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Re: Habitat 3rd Party Application Management

Post by JvdMaat »

Clicking the Enable Workstations (or Enable Servers) button, does that automatically also update all the agents with upgrade-able software found? Or does that just initiate the official scan, and then we can move from there?
I'm a little hesitant to just turn that on and have it go nuts without testing.

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Cubert
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Re: Habitat 3rd Party Application Management

Post by Cubert »

You can use the main view to see how each of your software searches will produce agents with that software, only enable the searches you need or want, add new searches for software you need to manage and then enable the clients workstations and or servers after that.


You can start out with lets say "Google" only by disabling all but the google search in the main view.

The go to 1 client and enable workstations and let it do its thing for 24 hours. Review results and when comfortable increase the enabled searches to add more softwares to the update services. or add more clients to just the google app and see how it flows across clients.

bmcfarlane
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Re: Habitat 3rd Party Application Management

Post by bmcfarlane »

Any chance of a Block 3rd party update check box at the client location and/or computer level? We have certain locations we cannot patch at a client but still need to update the rest of the locations.

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Cubert
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Re: Habitat 3rd Party Application Management

Post by Cubert »

So like a exclude ability per agent could be added fairly easily and that would not require any new windows.


I could add a new menu item to the agent list view that would allow you to select and exclude selected agents from updates. We still would want to scan agents for current packages and show installed version but show no repo version for that agent. Instead show "excluded" so you know whom is set to exclude.

Would something like that work for you?

bmcfarlane
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Re: Habitat 3rd Party Application Management

Post by bmcfarlane »

Yeah that would be great. We still want to know about out of date versions but sometimes have to manually update or just report so that seems like it would work well. Thanks!

JvdMaat
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Re: Habitat 3rd Party Application Management

Post by JvdMaat »

I would actually prefer not to enable this at the client level, but rather at the location level.
We support life sciences companies, and we split office agents from lab agents using a separate Location.
And lab machines do not get touched. Period. We do not patch them, we do not update them. (aside from set pre-agreed schedules when no lab experiments are done).

We cannot exclude this at the agent level, as any new lab agent that gets installed then needs to be manually tracked down and this "exclude" checked.

bmcfarlane
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Re: Habitat 3rd Party Application Management

Post by bmcfarlane »

Yeah I was thinking about this more and I think doing an EDF like you have for the POSH stuff at the location level as well would really help as if someone deploys an agent that we don't want to 3rd party patch it would be a manual change to block it at the computer level but if the location already had the Do not install 3rd party updates via Habitat EDF in place it would default to the right setting for the location. We do the same thing with automatic software installs at a location level by using an EDF to block them for the location. Same with Windows patching.

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