All workstations or devices that will be shown in the Applixure service require an agent installation ("Applixure Agent" or "Agent"), without which we are unable to display any information regarding that device or its associated software. To get a complete view of your workstation environment, make sure that Agent has been installed on all your PCs.
You can easily add new Agents to your environment by following the instructions below. At the end of this article there's also detailed installation instructions for different software deployment scenarios available.
1. Prerequisites
Operating system prerequisites
The Agent requires a minimum of Windows 8 operating system to function. However, we do not recommend running Agent on Windows operating system major versions that are End-of-Life and not maintained anymore by Microsoft as that may at any point in time in the future impact their ability to establish secure communication with our platform.
Any device with a full edition of the Windows operating system is supported, regardless of the form-factor or physical/virtual hardware.
Microsoft .NET prerequisites
For Windows devices, Agent requires Microsoft .NET Framework run-time to be present or installed on the Windows machine before it can function.
The minimum .NET Framework runtime version required by Applixure is .NET 4.5, but it will work with any newer .NET framework runtime present in the computer. All supported OS versions already contain the necessary .NET Framework built-in and, therefore, there are no extra prerequisite steps required before installing the Agent.
Networking / firewall prerequisites
To operate correctly and for the service to receive data, the Agent requires computers to have a continuously or frequently available Internet connection.
For all communication, the Agent uses a standard HTTPS (TCP port 443) outbound connection and should not, under normal circumstances, require any explicit firewall configurations.
Should your computers – or network between the Agents and public Internet – have outbound connection restrictions regarding HTTPS connections, please make sure that the devices where Agents has been installed are allowed to open HTTPS traffic to required addresses. There is a separate article detailing the necessary address/IP-address exclusions you can refer to.
Please note that any Man-in-the-middle (MITM) proxying of connections that intercepts the Agent's HTTPS traffic in between the devices and the Applixure's backend services may prevent the Agent from properly communicating with our service.
If you need to use explicit proxy settings for all outbound HTTPS traffic, please see our article on distributing proxy settings for Applixure Agent.
2. Installation
Acquiring Agent
You can download Agent installation packages for your environment from the Applixure UI, from the Deploy-tab:
You have a choice of downloading either the unified Agent installer (Interactive setup, executable-based) or separate automatically deployable installers for 32-bit and 64-bit (x64 and arm64) Windows versions (Windows Installer-based option).
Please select the installer that matches the operating system you have on your computers (32-bit or 64-bit).
When downloaded, Applixure Agent's installer will be named according to:
ApplixureAgent-EnvironmentName.exe - for unified installer
ApplixureAgent-EnvironmentName-architecture.msi - for MSI installer
What version of the installer should I use?
If you are unsure which bitness version of Windows you have, a unified installer can be used for both as it will automatically select the correct version. This installer type will need user interaction upon installation and is not suitable for automatic mass deployment of the Agent.
If you need to do automatic, or unattended, mass deployment of Applixure Agent using software deployment tool, such as AD, SCCM, Intune or some other system management, please use the MSI version of the installer. MSI-based deployment is always recommended over an EXE-based installer for easier installation management.
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Please note The Agent installation downloaded from the Applixure UI is already prepared (pre-configured) for the environment from which it was downloaded. As such, it does not need any parameterization upon deployment. This means that installation packages cannot be shared between different Applixure environments. Doing so will cause Agents to report data into the wrong Analytics environment! |
Installation packages using Windows Installer technology do not require any parameters, transforms or user interaction to be used. Unified installer also does not require any parameters, but requires user interaction to complete the installation.
Applixure does not recommend nor support deploying using re-packaged Agent installer, use only the original MSI packages downloaded from the Analytics UI. Deploying re-packaged Agents may introduce errors into installation configuration that cannot be properly troubleshooted by the Applixure if there are issues with the proper operation of the installed Agent.
For example installation instructions, please refer to the section below which applies to your intended solution to deploy the Agent. If you are unsure of the exact details, please consult the documentation of your software deployment tool on how to manage Windows Installer-based packages using its functionality.
After successful installation and for subsequent agent updates, Applixure takes care of keeping the Agent up-to-date automatically via the Agent's self-update mechanism. This means that, generally, you do not need to take care of rolling out updates to the Agent using the installer package once the initial deployment is completed for a given computer.
We, however, recommend that you re-download the installation package from time to time and refresh the installation package in your deployment solution if you intend to roll out Agents over a longer period or deploy new installations as a continuous ongoing function when deploying new devices to the environment. While the Agent eventually updates itself to the latest version after installation, the installer package is also re-generated automatically on our backend whenever new Agent versions are released. By re-downloading the installer and updating it into your deployment, you can make sure that newly deployed devices already have the latest fixes and features contained within even before the self-update has the chance to happen.
Installation using software deployment (ESD) systems (e.g. Microsoft SCCM, Intune etc.)
You can add the provided MSI package as-is to your software deployment system, only making sure that the computers receive the correct version of the agent software (32-bit vs. 64-bit; x64 vs. ARM64) if you have a heterogenous computing enviromment. MSI package will refuse to install into Windows that does not match the architecture or bitness of the package.
Due to the nature of Agent, installation needs to be performed under administrative user rights. It cannot be run with regular user rights.
Installation using scripting (e.g. AD logon scripts)
If you want to install the agents using scripting, use the Windows Installer runtime to execute the installation package in the following manner:
msiexec /i "path_to\ApplixureAgent-MyEnv-x64.msi" /qn
(Please replace the path to the install package according to your network location holding the installation files)
Due to the nature of the Agent, installation needs to be performed under administrative user rights, and as such, the script needs to be executed with elevated privileges. If the path is to the network location (such as AD's DFS share or some other shared network drive), the user account running the script has to have permissions to access the network share along with having local administrative rights to the device.
Manual Installation
It is always possible to install Agent individually on each target computer, using an EXE-based or Windows Installer (MSI)-based package. Applixure recommends using the MSI in this case as well.
To do so, follow the step-by-step guide below:
- After downloading the installation files from above links, copy the installation packages into the removable media (such as USB stick or CD/DVD disc) or to a network share which is accessible from the computer(s) that will receive the agent.
- On the target computer, log on using administrative credentials or a user account with privileges to install software.
- Open the shared network drive or insert the removable media to the machine, containing the Agent installation package.
- Locate and execute the appropriate installation package by double-clicking on the installer .MSI or .EXE file in the folder.
- If the user account does not have sufficient privileges on the computer, Windows may prompt you for credentials for another account that has administrative rights on the computer.
- After installation, rebooting the computer is not necessary but some of the features will start working only after the currently logged-on user has re-logged on to the device.
Terminal Servers, RDSH Servers and Citrix
If you intend to run Applixure Agent on a Windows Server that serves multiple interactive users (Terminal Services / Remote Desktop Session Host) either with Microsoft's built-in functionality or with 3rd part extensions such as Citrix, please refer to additional instructions for configuring the Agent in such scenarios.
Please note that these additional instructions do not apply to any other server types.
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