Things to consider doing to avoid having a lot of traffic on your network

Products

• IT Management Suite

Issue/Introduction

You are managing more than 5000 clients for example and your Symantec Management Platform (SMP Server) pushed out 12 terabytes on packages. It is about 40meg per machine on a daily basis. What you can do in order to reduce how much information is being sent through the network?

Environment

ITMS 8.x, 8.7.x

Resolution

These are some suggestions for some settings but not all. With those we are trying to see how much information the Notification Server is trying to send to the client computers and vice versa:

1. Check how frequently the Altiris Agent (Symantec Management Agent) reports back. You can see this at Configuration tab/Altiris Agent/Altiris Agent Configuration. There are many policies that applies to the different collections, but in general in the All Desktop Computers (excluding ‘Package Servers’) policy depending how many computers you have, you may need to setup this between 2 – 4 hrs range in the Request new configuration information option. As well, if you have Basic Inventory running more frequently than 1 day, put it back to one day.
2. Check how frequently is running Microsoft Active Directory Imports. Under Actions menu>Discovery>Import Microsoft Active Directory, check how frequently each rule is applied. Check on Specified Schedule and set a time that may fit better on your environment.
3. Check if there are Solutions Agents being deployed constantly. You can check this under Settings menu>Agents/Plug-ins and look on any of the Solutions subfolders that have an Agent Rollout option. Change the Schedule, if any, that is running too frequently.
4. Check if you are running Network Discovery. Go to Actions menu>Discovery>Network Devices​ or Settings menu>Discovery and Inventory>Network Discovery Settings and see if there is a Schedule setup for it. Make sure that it is not running too frequently.
5. Run the following reports in Reports menu> All Reports>Notification Server Management/Server, check the "Packages Distribution by Download Type​" report and see how your packages are been downloaded. 

Additional Information

"Ways to avoid network overload by agents downloads" (KB 262529)