Computers
A computer is one Windows workstation or server that Overseer manages. This page describes the Computers screen, what a computer's own page shows, and how Overseer recognises a computer it has seen before.
What a computer is
A computer in Overseer is the record of one Windows workstation or server that carries the Overseer agent and belongs to one client. Everything else in the product comes down to computers in the end: a deployment is aimed at a set of them, and a maintenance session is one complete ordered pass over one of them.
The record holds what Overseer knows about the computer, what has been done to it, and the tools for working on it directly.
The Computers screen
The Computers screen lists every computer in every client you are allowed to see. The same list appears inside a tenant, limited to that client's computers.
Counters above the list split it by status: active, new, pending, stale, orphaned and deleted. You can search by name, operating system, manufacturer, model, serial number, domain or user. Each row shows the computer's operating system, make and model, network address, client, primary user and tags.
Both lists support work in bulk. Select several computers and use Batch actions to act on all of them at once, for example to start a maintenance session on each.
A computer's own page
Opening a computer shows an overview first: the key facts about it, the tags it carries and its primary user. From there the page divides into tabs.
| Tab | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Overview | The key facts about the computer |
| Software | The software found on the computer. You can deploy software from here |
| Patching | The computer's patch status |
| Sessions | Every maintenance session run for this computer. Open a session to read it |
| Actions | The individual pieces of work done in those sessions |
| Drives | Physical and logical disks |
| Networking | Network interfaces |
| Antivirus | The protection products installed |
| Processes | The processes running on the computer |
| Agents | The agents through which Overseer reaches the computer |
| Terminal | A place to run a script on this computer without creating a deployment |
| Onboarding | The computer's onboarding |
Buttons on the page start work on the computer. Deployment detection reads the computer and changes nothing. Run maintenance starts a full session immediately, whether or not a maintenance window is open.
How Overseer recognises a computer
Overseer identifies a computer by a hardware identifier that the computer keeps for its whole life. It does not rely on the computer's name, its network address or a disk serial number, because all of those change: computers are renamed, network adapters are swapped and disks are replaced.
This has two results.
- One computer, one record. A computer reached by more than one route is still one computer. Where an integration reports it as well as the Overseer agent, both routes are listed against the same record, and only one of them needs to be online for Overseer to work.
- History survives a rebuild. A computer that is wiped and has Windows reinstalled is matched to its existing record. Overseer notices the fresh installation and marks the computer as needing onboarding again, so it appears among the new computers.
The primary user
The primary user is the person who mainly uses the computer. Overseer keeps a short running record of who has been logged on and sets the primary user from it. You can also name the primary user yourself when you onboard a computer.
The primary user matters because it lets a deployment be aimed at a person and resolved to the computer that person uses, and because some settings belong to a person's profile, not to the computer.