Microsoft Configuration Manager Integration

In addition to being able to run instructions from the Tachyon explorer, Tachyon also has Configuration Manager Console extensions which allow you to run Tachyon instructions directly from the Configuration Manager console. There is great value in this functionality as it allows you to target specific collections rather than having to set coverage parameters within Tachyon. 
This ConfigMgr integration is enabled via the Tachyon Toolkit installer (which will need to be installed on any machine where the Configuration Manager console is installed).

In our environment, we already have the ConfigMgr console installed on the 1ETRNCM server.

The Configuration Manager console may be installed and used by any user that is configured as an Administrative User. There are several Security Roles that may be given to the user and not all of these roles are permitted to use Configuration Manager to make changes that affect the network. When configuring the corresponding Tachyon user, you should take this into account when assigning the Tachyon Roles. For example, it would be unusual for a user with just the Read-only Analyst role in Configuration Manager to be granted the global Actioner role in Tachyon and therefore be able to perform Tachyon actions on all the devices in a particular collection but not be able to use Configuration Manager to perform any other tasks.

When in ConfigMgr, the role based security configured in the console will dictate what the user has access to. Tachyon will dictate what permissions a user or group has based on Tachyon's role based security, thus you must configure both very carefully to ensure the right access is provided to the users you are granting the ability to use Tachyon through the ConfigMgr console.

In the following exercises, we will configure the Tachyon back end for the ConfigMgr integration. Once configured, we will install the Tachyon Toolkit on the server with the ConfigMgr console, and lastly, we will configure a ConfigMgr administrative user with permissions in Tachyon.

Configuring the Consumers

Configuring the Integration/Consumers

Installing the Tachyon Toolkit

msiexec /i TachyonToolkit.msi /l*v TachyonToolkit.log

Using Tachyon through the ConfigMgr console

Now that we have installed the Toolkit and with it the ConfigMgr console extensions, as well as having configured the two consumers required for the ConfigMgr integration, we are ready to use Tachyon through the ConfigMgr console.

Start the Config Man Client Service

Lab Summary

In this lab, we configured Tachyon to integrate with Config Man, allowing us to execute instructions directly from the Config Man console. First, we configured two Consumers in Tachyon, RunInstructionUI and CMConsoleExtensions. This allows Config Man consoles to connect to Tachyon as consumers. Next, we added an administrative user in Tachyon to allow that user to execute instructions from Config Man.   Once configured, we ran an instruction from Tachyon to stop the SMS services on a machine. Since this was an action and not just a question, it required the 2-factor authentication as well as approval. Lastly, we queried which files exist under a specified path, which required no approval.  We configured the ConfigMgr integration with Tachyon, and we now have the ability to execute instructions directly from the Config Man console.  This is very valuable because we can target specific collections in Config Man which would be otherwise hard to define in Tachyon. Finally, we validated the data from the instructions run from Config Man is also displayed in the Tachyon explorer, thus allowing to fall back onto the explorer for reviewing data once the instructions have been run from Config Man.

Next Page
Ex 10 - TCN Opr v5.0 - Creating Instructions and Fragments Using TIMS