Summary

An overview of all the Tachyon features and enhancements. The page provides a brief overview of each feature and links to other pages with more detail.

Installation

Tachyon provides a Tachyon Setup wizard that installs all the separate parts of the Tachyon Platform using their individual installers. It is used to validate a server prior to running the installers, and supports a range of configurations as described in Design Considerations: Tachyon Setup configuration choices.

1E Client installers are also provided for Windows and packages for supported non-Windows OS.

1E Client Deployment Assistant is a wizard that assists Configuration Manager with deployment of 1E Client and other 1E client agents, guiding you through common settings for clients and deployments.

Explorer features

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Guaranteed State features

The Guaranteed State application gives you the ability to ensure device compliance with enterprise IT policies. For more information please refer to the Using Guaranteed State section of this documentation.

Policies and Rules

The Guaranteed State of a device is enforced by the Tachyon client at the device. One or more policies are deployed to devices according to the management groups the devices belong to. Each policy consists of one or more rules that are either check rules or fix rules.

For an explanation of management groups, please refer to the Tachyon Platform 5.2 - Management groups page. Management groups allow devices to be flexibly grouped, based on management group rules. This means you can easily administer devices based on, for instance, their Active Directory Organizational Unit, or their operating system version, or any other criteria supported by the management group rules.

The Guaranteed State Overview page

The Overview page lets you view the current state of your enterprise in terms of the devices and policies that have been defined and applied. It consists of a number of charts that let you monitor the state in real-time.

Guaranteed State Reports

The Guaranteed State application provides three reports that let you view the details for the currently defined Policies, Rules and Devices. The information in these reports is consolidated into the Guaranteed State Overview page charts.

Exploring devices

Guaranteed State provides a Devices page where you can view the currently connected devices. On this page you can also select one or more of the devices and click an Explore button that launches the Explorer application. You can then run an instruction using the selected devices as the coverage for the instruction.

Device Criticality

Device criticality is an attribute of a device that defines its importance within an organization. The default definition in Tachyon has these settings:

• Undefined (or not set)
• Non-critical
• Low
• Medium
• High
• Critical.

At present, criticality settings do not affect the primary operation of Guaranteed State. However, it is possible to use Tachyon to set device criticality and to view it within Guaranteed State.

Tachyon also supports the use of the criticality setting when defining coverage for an instruction. For example, you can target an instruction to be sent only to devices whose criticality is not Critical.

Patch Success features

Patch Success is a Tachyon application that lets you maximize success of enterprise-wide patch deployment. It provides a view of patch state of your estate, as well as supplementing your existing patch deployment methods.

Overview page

The overview page contains three charts that show the current device patch status, the security updates by severity level and patch performance across all the devices connected to Tachyon.

The charts are interactive letting you easily drill-down into details on specific items in the display. The table can toggle between the status of devices or status of patches.

Patches page

The Patches page shows a full list of patches that are applicable to devices within your estate and you can select an individual patch to view its details. From this page you can also launch the Explorer application with the coverage set to the selected devices.

Devices page

The Devices page shows a full list of devices within your estate and you can select an individual device to view its details.

Monitoring

The Monitoring pages show a full list of instruction history created by Patch Success and you can select individual instruction to view its details.

Settings features

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The Tachyon client

The Tachyon client is a feature of the 1E Client. On Windows devices, the 1E Client provides client features and modules for other 1E products. On non-Windows devices, the 1E Client only provides Tachyon client features.

Tachyon enables rapid response to instructions using the Tachyon client, which supports the retrieval of information, running actions and device tagging. The 1E Client can also be extended to support additional features. On Windows OS, the 1E Client is installed as a service, with a small footprint.

Tachyon Activity Record feature

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System status bar and notification area

Tachyon includes a system status bar that displays the number of Tachyon instructions in progress and current and historical connectivity information for the total number of devices connected to Tachyon.

The notification area provides information on the logged on user or administrator and access to their notifications.

Certificates

Tachyon uses certificates on the Tachyon Server and Tachyon client devices to maintain the security of the system. Any custom Instructions must be code-signed with a certificate that has been registered in your 1E license before they can be run in Tachyon. 

The certificates feature includes:

• Support for Cryptographic Next Generation certificates

• Upgrade to latest version of OpenSSL v1.0.2h

• Security to enforce Tachyon client device certificates

Tachyon integration

Tachyon can integrate with 3rd party products. It integrates seamlessly with Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager, it can use 1E Nomad to add content download capabilities, provides a fully-featured consumer API and can even be used as a response delivery mechanism by 3rd party applications.

Consumer management

Tachyon provides a dedicated page where the 3rd party consumers can be enabled and managed by Tachyon Consumer Administrators, as described in Consumers.

Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager console integration

Configuration Manager users can use all the features of Tachyon from within the Configuration Manager console.

• Run questions and actions that target the devices in Configuration Manager collections.

Tachyon client integration with 1E Nomad to enable efficient download of content

Tachyon can leverage the features of the industry-respected 1E Nomad to enable content to be downloaded to the Tachyon client device. Using 1E Nomad provides the following benefits:

• Significantly reduces the bandwidth required for delivering software
• Small offices or sites connected via poor network links can receive software updates more reliably
• Reduces the need for large numbers of Configuration Manager servers
• Faster Configuration Manager implementations because fewer servers are required
• Distribute software to home, mobile and remote office users
• Low cost – easy to deploy
• No new infrastructure or skills required
• Reduces software distribution costs

The feature is a set-and-forget option on the Tachyon client. By default it is enabled and means that Tachyon will automatically use Nomad to download content if it is installed on the Tachyon client device (Nomad is currently supported on Windows devices only). The prerequisites for using Nomad are given on Supported Platforms. The options for configuring Nomad integration are NomadContentDownloadEnabled and NomadContentDownloadTimeoutSecs in the 1E Client configuration file.

Tachyon consumer API

Tachyon implements a complete API for controlling the questions, answers, responses and workflows that implement the Tachyon features for third-party applications including ServiceNow.

The Tachyon API feature includes:

• Consumer API versioning
• Improved version and error reporting support in Consumer API
• Extended RBAC API extensions for consumers

Tachyon can offload responses directly to 3rd party applications

Tachyon can be used as the means to gather data for 3rd party applications. Using its fast response time to gather the data it then be configured to pass the data on without storing it locally. The offloading is configured for each consumer on the Consumers page. To use this feature the consumer must be configured to use the offloaded responses data.