About this Guide
This user guide introduces you to the Snare Agent Manager (SAM). The Snare Agent Manager is used for the license allocation and management of the v5+ Snare Agents using the Web application interface which can be used via any modern web browser (The minimum versions are IE9+. and current versions of Chrome, Safari and Firefox, refer to the installation guide for more details ). The SAM is designed to provide centralized management of all your Snare agent licensing. It contains a dashboard to allow the easy identification and status of the licensing system, usage and if there are operational issues from agents and their licenses. The agent management interface allows a user to customize the description of systems by adding a label or tag to systems to make it easier to identify the agents by using a filter or search term for when there are hundreds or thousands of agents configured via the SAM. The SAM only runs using a HTTPS secure session but can allow a user to configure it to use any custom certificate installed on the system. It also contains an Agent scanner to discover existing agents on your network using the web interface port of the agents. This can make it easier to discover agents on the network and know what version they are so upgrades can be planned and scheduled. The scanner will discover and classify all agents both Enterprise and the older OpenSource versions.
The installation and setup of the SAM and Snare Agents generally only takes a few minutes to get going. Depending on the customers environment and the separation of networks they may requite multiple SAM's to be installed. If you require multiple SAM's please speak to your support representative so we can help provide what you need. The SAM will continue to evolve over time to include other centralized agent management features. This SAM user guide describes how to use the Web interface to configure the SAM and allocate licenses to your Snare Agents.
The basic operation and usage of the SAM is to configure the v5 agents to "phone home" in the Access Configuration section of the agent to obtain a license token. The SAM is designed to manage the pool of licenses for the corporate network. The SAM can manage multiple license keys for separate departments if require or use a single license key pool for the enterprise. License slots used by agents can easily be removed if a system has been decommissioned and thus returning the license slot back to the available free pool so it can be allocated to another agent/system. As long as the systems running the agents dont have significant hardware changes or change the hostname the system will continue to use the same license slot upon system reboots and downtime period of up to default of 30 days, this value can be changed in the general settings if required. If a system gets rebuild on the same hardware using the same hostname the SAM will re-license the agent using the existing license slot if it was not manually removed. For systems that are in VMWare clusters where the guest can migrate from one physical host to another the agents should continue to operate as normal and not use any additional license slots. Other Hypervisor clusters should operate in the same fashion.
Other guides that may be useful to read include the following:
v5 agents: