I have a couple feature requests and bugs that I would like to bring to your attention. I have already sent them through the feedback option within TNI, however I am not sure the messages are making their way to your servers due to our corperate firewall.
The first request being:
When searching an IP range, show progress.
We have a lot of systems that are on the other side of the world and connected to our network over VPN and a direct line, and the best method we have of scanning these systems at the moment is using an IP range. The issue is, how the network is set up on the other end, the range in which these addresses is quite large and it takes a LONG time to search every possible IP to see if a device exists. As far as what I can tell, TNI has no way of telling the progress of what IP it is currently looking at, and has no sort of progress we can check on. After a while when searching an IP range we stop seeing new devices pop up, but says it is still searching for quite some time. We have no way of telling whether the search is hanging somewhere for whatever reason, or there is simply no more devices past that point.
Display that it can't connect to TNI server if it can't check for updates
Similair to how I don't think we can get out to send feedback messages through the program, I currently can't get out to check for updates due to our corperate firewall. This IS a technical issue on our end, and we can work to get it resolved, however TNI simply states that there are no updates rather than that it can't connect to the server to check for updates. I have simply came to this site to redownload the trial again and re-installed it to apply the updates for now. But if it wasn't for me coming on to this site in order to check if other people were having some of the same issues we are having, I wouldn't even of known there was an update that we could download that did indeed fix a couple problems we were having.
Serial number and model number, manufacturer as common values in all reports
We have encountered a number of scenarios in the custom reports where it would be quite helpful to have the ability to use serials, model numbers, and the manufacturer of the scanned system to use as global fields that can be used for all the different types of reports, such as with software as the object of a report. We lease our systems here and return them and get new ones every 4 years, we however have a lot of expensive software that we wish to extract off the systems before we send them back, and use TNI to quickly find which systems have what software on them. The issue is, we have all the systems brought back up in IT offline just before they go back, and a lot of these systems are highly inconvenient, or in rare cases, impossible to set up and power up so we can find out the machine name or MAC address so we can then use the report. It would be MUCH easier if we could just create a custom report with the serial numbers of systems that have the specific software we are looking for installed on them, so we can get to them and get it off. The serial number is a unique identifier that is, in most cases, physically stamped onto all our systems from the manufacturer. We currently get around this by either A) creating a report with the asset as the object of the report and adding software as a field, or B) creating two different reports both with the machine name as the field and "stiching them together" within Excel. The first method is inconvenient because it can be so bloated for machines that have lots of software installed on them, and make it difficult to find what we are looking for specifically at a glance, and the second method is a few extra steps of work for us to manually create results that are almost there already. Neither of these are critical, however this is just one example of many cases where having the option to get the serial number (or better yet, model and manufacturer as well), on these kinds of reports.
License limit exceeded. By how much?
This last one is regards to the detail of that error message. It simply tells us that our license limit is exceeded. What it doesn't tell us is by how much. We are confident that we are within the number of systems on our network that our license allows for, and simply have a lot of information for devices that no longer exist (mostly due to active directory requiring some "spring cleaning"). If we could see by how many devices we exceed our limit by, it would help us get a clearer picture on whether or not we actually need to get a bigger license, or whether we just need to hold out until we can get our act into gear and get the records of these old systems of our network.
I am really happy with the software you guys have developped so far, and it has shaved quite a lot of time and effort on our end.
I Thank you for your time, and it would be nice to see some of these issues considered for a future update.
Scott.