What needs improvement with BigFix?

BigFix could improve its asset management capabilities to discover assets, including hardware. More improvements could be made in asset management.

For improvements, it would be good if BigFix supported more databases. Currently, it only supports DB2 and Microsoft SQL. Adding support for other databases like Oracle would be beneficial.

The solution needs to improve console speed. I would like to see one console that does everything. It doesn't need to have a big client console.

The solution’s pricing could be improved.

Some clients have adopted it but have expressed concerns about its flexibility. They have other tools that effectively address this flexibility. BigFix offers basic vulnerability management capabilities, but it lacks integration.

The product should become cloud-based. Also, the peer nesting ability of the product is a little backward. It has a Peer messaging capability, like a peer-to-peer feature, but it's a bit backward compared to Microsoft's content delivery gateway. The content delivery needs to improve to accommodate new technology and move away from the old ways of deploying content. In future releases, BigFix should become a complete cloud solution.

One aspect that could be improved is the speed of the console. Sometimes it can be slow, which is something that needs to be addressed. When compared to other solutions like Tenable or CrowdStrike, BigFix constantly communicates with the database in real time, which can cause some slowness.

I'm not sure if there are any extra features needed. It could use better integration with Hypervisor products like VMware. This is where it is lacking right now. There are articles available explaining how to integrate with VMware. However, it's my understanding that it is somewhat difficult. I am not sure if this is available on the cloud or not.

It's got some complexity when we're trying to figure out the IBM setup for software. The sub-capacity licensing was a challenge for some of it. We had trouble getting it to calculate right. It's better for hardware discovery. We get to increase its capabilities for hardware discovery. They need to enhance their sub-capacity capabilities, so we can use it easier for sub-capacity so that it is less of an art form and more of a science. We'd like agents to be able to collect usage.

In order to derive maximum benefit from BigFix, it is essential that we configure all of its features and implement them effectively. If the automation could be improved we would be able to mitigate the risks associated with zero-day threats.

The deployment has room for improvement and can be more streamlined. The automation has room for improvement.

Only one thing has room for improvement, BigFix should create some amount of localization in the product. For example, in most enterprises, being a large bank doesn't mean that they have the best network. Their remote branches can be working on a minimal network. The solution should have some kind of a local caching methodology, where the patches can be taken locally into a localized relay server, and from there, the patch can be applied, so that there is not much usage of the network required. What is happening today is, every system, even for it to be patched, has to be on the internet. I would like to be able to apply patches locally without the requirement of the internet or at least minimal internet usage to apply a patch.

I would like the dashboard to be improved to show the problematic machines and good machines.

The main shortcoming of BigFix was integration with vulnerability management. If you had a vulnerability in your software and BigFix on the endpoint, you needed integration with Qualys, Tenable, or another vulnerability management solution to fix that. It was like, "Okay, we can identify issues, and get that information back from the endpoint, but what are we doing about it?"

BigFix can improve the way machines report back to the console. In the external relay management environment, it has become more of a hybrid environment with most of the machines not being on-site. The need of having public-facing reporting items interconnected is becoming more and more crucial. In general, the reporting could use some enhancement. In a future release, it would be a benefit to have a cloud-based solution with external cloud-based relays. Additionally, having a remote control in the cloud feature would be interesting.

The BigFix Inventory could have an increased scope regarding the tools that can be detected. It does not cover all the possible software installed in Asset. We used the BigFix module in a ILMT module to have the proper coverage. If we had the two of them combined, this would really assist with the inventory of software. Sometimes we may have a few issues with the fixlet Relevance where the Windows patches sometimes identifies as a false positive. We have opened tickets with the support team. They fixed that as soon as possible.

The solution could improve by adding support drivers for different systems and equipment. When you have a lot of different computers if they could fix how to install any updates, firmware, or drivers for different systems or servers it would be good. In an upcoming release, they should add database support included and deliver the solution as a cloud service similar to the services on Microsft Azure.

I remember doing restarts a few times. So, making sure that it is rock solid from an executable perspective is important.

Improvements can be made when it comes to in-place and OS upgrades. For example, SCCM provides a feature upgrade that's automatically synchronized, whereas in BigFix it doesn't synchronize for feature updates for Windows 10. I'd also like to see some more advanced reporting tools.

Additionally, the Relay architecture needs some aspects to be improved - reporting to consoles, relay selection process can sometimes be slow, clients reporting to relays

BigFix needs a relook at the Reports and Dashboards. Since BigFix is projected as "THE PLATFORM" of securing the endpoint - it is very imperative to have Dashboarding and Reporting capabilities that offer flexibility of a high level to the most granular level of details.

BigFix should improve its compatibility with other platforms, such as Linux.

Sometimes the workstations communicate back to the BigFix server two or three days in a week or something similar. Sometimes there can be a delay reporting back to the server for a variety of reasons, such as users turning their computer off when they go home. When the user comes back and turns the computer back on BigFix needs to synchronize and sometimes it can take some time, approximately one week. The communication between the agent and the server should be faster, there is room for improvement in this area.

The reporting structure could be a little more simplistic. Currently, it throws too many vulnerabilities. Some of them are not needed because they are only informational and limitations, and they are not of much help. It doesn't need to show us these things. Its pricing should be improved. It is too costly.

The only thing that I don't like about BigFix is that it does not support other devices such as printer firmware, router firmware, and things like that. I will be happy if I can control everything and get everything else in there, even if it is just a line item. They can do some enhancements to the Web UI. I am trying to get customers to be able to manage their environment by using Web UI, and it would be good if we can delete endpoints by using Web UI. We should also be able to generate Excel content or data tables from the Web UI without having to go to the console. It is small stuff, and it drives me crazy that I have to go to another console to do these things.

The remote software installation could be better. I would also like to see mobile device management within the BigFix itself. I would also like to have GlobalProtect management.

It's not an easy question as it provides all of the things we need. It meets our requirements.

BixFix is good, but they have to update the product. For example, we need AI, ML, and IIT. We also want to edit the discovery of our assets less. There are some status problems we can't really call a bug. We want them to improve and offer these things. I want a Manager of Manager. I also want to see the multiple control and a multiple report format. I want to get the whole report within a single console. It's like you have a simple car and you want to buy a BMW. A simple car also works, and every car has four wheels. But we all want more power, to be more agile, and receive more status updates.

We would like to see a different license plan, e.g. to include features from lifecycle with Patch Management, as an example.

The support of other 3rd party ssytems could be better. ServiceNow is supported by BigFix - But there is a lot of other systems that BigFix could support and vice versa and make it even more powerful. With all the inventory information avout the osftware and hardware in the network of the organization - The BigFix database could be a very valuable source for other maniufactors and porviders of software and hardware.

Historically, the company used to belong to IBM, and there was competition between MaaS360 and BigFix components. They neglected the mobile portion, or the mobile device management portion of BigFix. It has been sold. IBM sold it two years ago to HCL of India. Therefore, that's one thing that's lacking - the mobile side. They don't have a proper mobile device management capability. They're working on it, however, that's the one thing that needs improvement so that you can have full unified endpoint management. The ability to handle removable media encryption on the removable media label, et cetera, is lacking due to the fact that you cannot really control your USB device. Of course, recently, we had a use case where we had to lock down the USB devices, but there were, for instance, certain machines that were on a very specific model of USB drives that had a license key. This customer was using licensed software, and the license was on the USB stick. Now, the USB stick must be in the machine the whole time in order to use the application. The solution needs to bring back the granular control of the USB devices that they offered a year or four years ago. That way, you can say "these devices are allowed" or "these devices are not allowed". That's the one major thing, in my opinion, that they could rethink, USB device control for removable media. They're doing a lot of work on remote control. They are working on making it very, very simple. However, ti's not quite there yet.

I would like to see the Self Service section made more user-friendly. With respect to OSD, I would like to control the task sequence competently from the BigFix console.

I would like to see API connectivity, built-in API connectors to the standard toolsets, whether it's for ServiceNow or Qualys. More API connectivity to make it easier to integrate to other tools.

I'm looking for them to make big web UI improvements.

The self-service application seems to need some work to replace the client UI. There are a lot of pop-ups if you use a baseline as the object that you're setting to a workstation. Unless you're using web UI, the message is not customizable in the user notification.

I would like to see more flexibility on how queries are run through the API. We've got some of our desktop customers that use the API to query a lot, and that actually impacts our server automation plan sometimes. On a day when they might be heavily querying and it hits a web report server, that messes with our server automation plans and the reporting for it. The server automation should be hitting the actual BigFix database versus the web reports. I would also like to see improvement on configuring where the logs go. It's been annoying for both of our desktop teams. Even on the Linux side, we should be able to set the property to have the logs go to a different location. It's annoying because sometimes if you need to clear out the best data you end up losing all the logs. You can try to save it off but it's an extra step. If you try to move those logs ahead of time with the client property it shouldn't be an issue, install the BigFix agent into a nonstandard location. It's important for some of our UNIX endpoints who don't give enough space. It should be supported from the install, out of the box.

I would like to see for it to be a little easier for new users to be able to learn and create relevant statements. In my opinion, that's the hardest part for bringing on new people that haven't had BigFix experience. Being able to have easier ways to build relevance in ActionScript would be the biggest improvement I'd like to see.

* More integration with external data * Extending the reporting capabilities * Integration with some of the service ticket providers

I would like to see integration of user security between the different products to be improved. There's separate security for compliance, separate security for web reports, and the console, and you have to manage those things separately.

I'd like to see better API integration with BigFix. We have some tremendous API capability inside of CyFIR and the ability to take textual search results, for example, and bring that back into the BigFix dashboard. This would be of extreme interest to us and our customers.

It actually increased network traffic. Microsoft and Apple have incredibly large downloads, so when you're downloading to thousands of machines it's huge. I would like to see more emphasis on using the web console, to have the same power as the full fat client console that they do they now. It's a lighter way to log in and it would be faster for our operators to do their work. The console tends to take a long time for a large number of clients.

I would eventually like to see a SaaS offering, a cloud-hosted BigFix instance where we only have to put a relay in our environment.

I'd like to see: * More visibility * Better reporting * I'd like for it to be more futuristic, for it to be less plain Windows looking with a little more pizazz. * Better integration, with the different applications within BigFix. Instead of sometimes feeling like four or five different applications, they need to be integrated a little better within themselves. * Better folder structure internally.

I would like to see file consistency and sizing, and I would like to see more robust reporting in the power management features. Energy use and consumption has become a cry within IT development. It's an underserved piece of the product that has implications that could allow security and green IT and sustainability to be married better.

I would like to see improvements in the web UI program and also a BigFix console for Mac OS.

I would like better support on the backend.

I would like to see: * More custom content * Better content for Mac * Automated patching. They have this but I'm looking for improvements. * Automated baselines for patching.

I would like to see different types of reporting and the ability to integrate closer with the cloud.

I want to see a solution for being able to deploy automated software to a Mac running OS X 10.13, something that's going to deal with kernel exceptions and answering prompts for user permissions for data folders and whatnot. They need to really streamline and automate the Mac software deployment.

The scalability of the web UI product doesn't scale to the size that we need for our implementation so it needs to expand. I would also like to see the capability to develop on the back of the web UI capability. There are lots of web features and integrations that we could do with web UI that it would be nice to be able to put on top of what's already there, rather than waiting for IBM to develop what we need.

I would like to see SDK for Web UI included in the next release.

I would like to see a WebUI SDK so we could take what is provided currently and be able to build our own customized web UI for particular customers that want to sell service.

Network traffic is one of our current pain points. BigFix's high performance and high availability in our environment easily overwhelms our high-performance firewalls. Every time we push out patches to our entire population, it makes the firewalls very unhappy for about an hour and slows down some of our core enterprise apps. We're working to identify ways to fix that. We think that BigFix provides mechanisms for spreading out that load over time. We're going to be deploying that soon which will hopefully take care of the problem. Bandwidth is never a problem for us, we have enormous bandwidth. The number of sessions gets overwhelming when you have tens of thousands of machines all getting patched simultaneously. We're just going to spread that out over time and BigFix does offer that capability. Around the scalability concern, I would like to see the ability to run teamed, clustered, or hierarchical root servers in order to provide a more robust, high availability system. The single monolithic root server model does somewhat bother me.

I'd definitely like to see additional feature parody in the web UI versus the console. There are certain things that you can only do in the console and they're very cumbersome to do, like secure parameters, for example. That's definitely something that has a wide degree of utility but it needs to be easier to surface. At this particular juncture between the transition, between the Legacy console and the web UI, it's hard to justify dealing with the cumbersome aspects of the Legacy console when theoretically everything's been through the web UI.

I would like to see much better web reporting because as it is now, it's convoluted, basic, it's not modern, and there are limitations to it.

Upgrading from an Evaluation license to a production license is not error free. Managed endpoints still gets stuck with the evaluation masthead and as such would not let you execute actions outside the BigFix management client maintenance actions. This needs to be improved

The first and foremost thing that I would like to see improved is the insight into the right-click menu context itself. The second thing is that IBM has sold IBM BigFix to another company. That's negative feedback that we can give them. For the next quarter, BigFix will not be a part of IBM. That's another drawback that we are going to see. I would request them to build robots, or an easier way for integration with other tools, like ITSM tools.

* Complex design and administration * Offline management * Remote support on unsupported platforms * A large infrastructure required to implement for a medium-sized organization * Also, I would like to see if BigFix could be application aware for more in-depth compliance and reporting.

I would like to see a system to erase a virus and then create an analysis to find a virus. This would be a nice additional feature for the product. In addition, sometimes there is a lag time for our users.