Autodesk Product Manager

[Anonymous]

We're having problems getting APM to search without stalling or crashing out. Occasionally it will run to completion on a scan for a limited range of products across a limited number of end points (600-700) but for the most part it stops functioning.

We're told by our Autodesk accredited provider that Autodesk don't support this tool.

Anyone, any idea what the root of this problem might be?

Anyone, any idea how to achieve the same result with any other tools, ie. to be able to audit license details for all Autodesk products across a large distributed estate? We're thinking we might be able to program SMS to query end point Registry entries but that sounds like hard work unless someone's already done it and would be willing to share.

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[Anonymous]

Ok so things have moved on since my original post.

We have APM running pretty reliably now but only by driving it from the command line with just a progress bar displayed and output to a CSV file, which is fine for our purposes.

We've abandoned any hope of getting similar audit detail from SMS.

Autodesk came back to say APM was supported however despite extensive dialogue we got no closer to identifying the root cause of the instability. With the advent of the updated release of APM - now branded Autodesk Asset Locator - the goal posts have moved.
Disappointingly AAL is no more stable than APM was was - if anything it's worse IMHO.

If anyone has had similar experiences and found a solution to them please let us know.

[TravisNave]

I would be surprised if you got any kind of useful response to this. Personally, I think all of the Autodesk tools suck. I mean, look at the PLU and the LTU. Autodesk should just send you a pad of paper and a pen and tell you that their solution is for you to go from system to system. At least this solution would work! 😄

[Anonymous]

One can but hope : )
With 100+ sites around the world pad n pen isn't very practical.

To be fair we're pushing it relatively hard and APM is doing the business most of the time. A typical big scan is taking in some 3-4000 end points and successfully scanning ~75%, the rest it can't reach due to some yet to be resolved access rights issue.

That's not to say that otherwise both APM and AAL aren't more flakey than the Cadbury variety.