Using the Roll-Up Policy

The Roll-Up Policy dictates to the services that are running on a specific server where they should roll-up or transmit the inventory information that they have received from the various workstations. By doing this, the system provides the capability to receive local inventory information and then move it up in the tree hierarchy, consolidating inventory information from various remote locations, and constructing a more centralized database of inventory information (see Chapter 13, "Using ZENworks Workstation Inventory," for more detailed information).

When the inventory system is installed into the network, the system creates service objects that govern the behavior of the agents that are working on each of the inventory servers. These agents also respond to this policy to understand to which service agent they should transmit their inventory information. All service agents that are associated with this policy transmit their inventory information to the same target agent.

The NDS Rights, Other, and Rights to Files and Folders pages are described in the "Setting Up a Server Policy Package" section.

Figure 12.10 shows a sample of this page.

Figure 12.10. Inventory Roll-up Policy of a Server Policy Package.

As you can see in Figure 12.10, the policy simply requests the object DN of the service where the associated agents should transmit their inventory information. The local agents can keep a copy of the inventory data, if they are a designated database gathering location, but they still transmit an additional copy if they are configured to do so.

In this policy, you press the browse button to the right of the field and browse the tree to select the service object of the inventory agent that you want to receive the information.

The roll-up policy is only read by the service manager agent upon startup and then every 1000 minutes (this is not configurable). So if the policy change needs to be immediately effective, the service manager agent on the server must be stopped and restarted.