Install on Windows with SCCM

Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager, still widely called SCCM, is the right route for deploying to many Windows machines at once. You package the installer as an application and pass the two required parameters on its command line.

What do I need first?

• Your environment ID.
• A forwarder auth token.
• .NET Core 5.0 or newer, which the bundled installer already includes.
• The Inception Forwarder .exe. See Forwarder Downloads.

Plan which machines go first. The initial backscan is a full disk scan and is resource intensive for a while, so do not start with critical assets. Your earliest installs take the heaviest load because they upload the greatest number of files nobody has seen before; each subsequent machine finds more of its files already known, and its backscan is shorter and lighter. See Asset Deployment Strategy.

Package it as an application

1. Put the forwarder .exe on a share your clients can reach.
2. Open the Configuration Manager console.
3. Go to Software Library → Overview → Application Management → Applications.
4. Right-click Applications and create an application, then follow the wizard.
5. For Location, give the share path, for example \\Server\Share\Inception_Forwarder.exe.
6. When prompted for the Installation Program, use:

file_name.exe TOKEN=auth_token ENVIRONMENT_ID=env_id /quiet /norestart /log C:\stairwell.log

Replace file_name.exe, auth_token, and env_id with your own values.

7. Finish the wizard, then deploy the application to your application groups.

TOKEN and ENVIRONMENT_ID are the only required parameters. Everything else the installer accepts, including backscan behavior, CPU and bandwidth limits, and starting in sleep mode, is on Windows Install Parameters, and any of them can be added to that same command line.

Keep /log C:\stairwell.log. When a deployment fails on a subset of machines, that log is the difference between diagnosing it and re-running the package hopefully.

Confirm it worked

1. Go to app.stairwell.com.
2. Open Assets and find the new asset names.
3. Check the data under All Objects.

File ingestion takes a few minutes to appear, and the backscan continues well beyond that. An asset that has checked in but shows few objects is normal early on. See Assets for the columns that tell you how far along a backscan is.

If a machine never appears, start at What to Check First rather than reinstalling.

What should I read next?

• Windows Install Parameters, for everything else the command line accepts.
• Asset Deployment Strategy, for what order to deploy in.
• Pre-Deployment Check, for the network requirements to confirm before a large rollout.