Summary

If an Amazon Web Services (AWS) connection is configured in FlexNet Manager Suite/Flexera One ITAM to import data from many AWS accounts, the import reader process to retrieve data from those accounts may run for longer than 30 minutes.

Details

The following page (amongst others) recommends configuring AWS connections to run every 30 minutes in order to gather ephemeral data from AWS before it is removed: Configuring Connections to AWS (FlexNet Beacon Installed on EC2 instance) using IAM Roles[.|https://docs.flexera.com/fnms/EN/WebHelp/index.html#tasks/IB-ConnectAWSfib.html].] However due to this issue, the actual process that runs may take longer than 30 minutes to complete and so attempting to run it every 30 minutes may be ineffective.

Here is an example of extracted details from a log from an import process affected by this issue. Note the long time taken for some steps in the process.

2021-11-29 20:59:51,977 [INFO ]     Get AWS EC2 dedicated hosts information (Transfer data from source 'AWS-Prod' to FNMP)
[...]
2021-11-30 02:09:39,740 [INFO ]       Successfully processed in 5 hours, 9 minutes, 46 seconds.
2021-11-30 02:09:39,740 [INFO ]     Get AWS EC2 instance information (Transfer data from source 'AWS-Prod' to FNMP)
[...]
2021-11-30 04:18:27,561 [INFO ]       Successfully processed in 2 hours, 8 minutes, 47 seconds.
2021-11-30 04:18:27,561 [INFO ]     Get AWS EC2 reserved instance information (Transfer data from source 'AWS-Prod' to FNMP)
[...]
2021-11-30 06:27:07,989 [INFO ]       Successfully processed in 2 hours, 8 minutes, 40 seconds.
[...]
2021-11-30 06:28:40,661 [INFO ]     Reading data for 'VirtualMachine' successfully processed in 9 hours, 28 minutes, 47 seconds

Workaround

Separate AWS inventory connections may be configured in the beacon UI, with each connection covering a subset of the total set of AWS accounts. This will not necessarily reduce the total time taken to retrieve data from AWS, but will reduce the time taken to process each connection and make the overall process more manageable.