Installation and Configuration

Get up to speed with the Quick Start Wizard

• The new Quick Start Wizard gets you started with the Alloy Discovery, guiding you through the steps of discovering and auditing computers on your network.

Active Directory integration

• The Active Directory integration feature facilitates computer discovery.

Windows Vista support

• Windows Vista is now supported on both host and client machines.

Unicode support

• Alloy Discovery implements Unicode support for entering, capturing, and displaying data using national characters.

Enhanced audit methods and strategies

A wide array of deployment scenarios

• single and multi-domain networks
• workgroup networks
• external and isolated networks (DMZ)
• standalone computers

On-demand audit

• The On-Demand Audit feature was greatly improved, resulting in ease of configuration, increased reliability and security, and enhanced usability. Now no client-side configuration is required. The On-Demand Audit supports Windows, Linux, and Mac OS computers. Using parallel processing, multiple computers can be audited simultaneously to minimize the audit time.

Audit agents for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS

• In addition to the On-Demand Audit you can implement the audit of your Windows, Linux, and Mac computers using login scripts and scheduled tasks using the new and improved audit agents.

Portable audit

• The Portable Audit enables you to deploy an audit package to a flash drive to manually audit standalone computers. This method is useful to audit computers on locked-down network segments.

Audit remote sites and collect audit snapshots by email

• The new Audit via E-mail feature allows you to configure the audit to send the snapshots by email to a designated address, where Alloy Discovery can automatically collect them from.

Usability and flexibility improvements

Computer groups

• The new group infrastructure was created. Now you can combine computers in groups that represent physical or logical subsets of your network, audit the combined computers with individual group settings, and analyze the audit data for these groups.

User interface

• The new Side Bar allows you to manage your groups.
• The new Computer Preview Pane provides a configuration summary for a computer currently selected in the Computer List or in the Side Bar.

Computer management

• Now you can easily open any computer in the Computer Management console or in Windows Explorer. The default configuration of External Tools now includes an array of network management utilities, including Remote Desktop Connection, VNC, Reboot, Shutdown, Wake-on-LAN, and more.

Functionality improvements

Inventory Analyzer for Windows

• A number of new data items are now captured in audit snapshots: used disk space, data bus slots, Windows updates, events in the Directory Service, DNS Service and File Replication Service Event Logs, USB and PCI devices, etc.
• Added information from the Windows Security Center, including the Firewall, Auto Update, AntiVirus, and AntiSpyware details.
• System environment variables now can be used in path-related command line options.

Event log consolidation

• The Event Log Consolidation feature has been improved by including a configurable filter which allows you to capture only events satisfying a combination of criteria.

Audit Data Viewer

• Categorization of audit data in the Audit Data Viewer (former Audit Snapshot Viewer) is more comprehensive now.

SMBIOS Filter

• The SMBIOS Filter now supports wild cards for ease of configuration. Also, the default filters have been expanded to include additional items specific to newer systems.