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Software inventory and license utilization
You can classify the discovered software so that reports in BigFix Inventory reflect your entitlements and properly show utilization of license metrics by particular products.
Contracts management
The contracts management group shows all contract-related reports in one place. This allows you to easily manage all your contracts.
Hands-on tutorial for contract management
Contracts overview

Software inventory and license utilization
You can classify the discovered software so that reports in BigFix Inventory reflect your entitlements and properly show utilization of license metrics by particular products.
- Collecting Oracle Measurements Data
  Starting from version 10.0.15, BigFix Inventory extends its capability to collect Oracle Java SE measurements data. Since version 10.0.16, BigFix Inventory also collects Oracle Database options and measurements data.
- Vendor-specific predefined reports available in dashboard Inventory Reports
  Vendor-specific predefined reports available in dashboard Inventory Reports provide software discovery and licensing information for specific software vendors of BigFix Inventory customers. These reports help Software Asset Managers manage software for their vendors and prepare for contract negotiations and license audits. To view the reports, click on a vendor in the vendor-specific dashboard.
- Reported license metrics
  BigFix Inventory reports utilization for a number of license metrics for IBM and non-IBM products. It also shows products that are assigned any BigFix metric even if calculating utilization is not yet supported for this metric. It gives you an overview of all IBM metrics for which you should have licenses.
- Software classification
  After new components are discovered, they are assigned to products based on bundling rules. If the initial assignment does not reflect your entitlements, work with the software inventory until it matches the entitlements. To make metric calculation accurate, assign each component to a product, exclude, or suppress the instances that should not be included in the calculation, and confirm your actions. After you confirm the actions, the classification is complete, and the metric calculation is accurate.
- Server Software Catalog
  To correctly identify components of software products in your infrastructure, ensure that your server software catalog is always up-to-date. Periodically import a new server software catalog that contains the most recent software products. Also, manually add products that are installed in your infrastructure but do not have corresponding entries in the catalog.
- Reports
  Reports provide detailed information about the computers in your infrastructure and the software items that are installed on these computers. By viewing the reports regularly, you can check whether actual installations reflect the software inventory information and ensure that the capacity values are assigned to products correctly. You can decide what type of information you want to display by choosing the appropriate type of report. You can also customize the type and amount of information that is displayed in a report and save the report settings to reuse them.
- Enterprise applications inventory
  Software components are discovered during software scans. The scans correlate data that is collected from the computers with the content of the software catalog, and thus determine whether a component is installed. However, software scans do not discover details of some enterprise applications, for example licensable options of Oracle Database or editions of Microsoft Exchange. The details are discovered by dedicated fixlets. If you are interested in discovering additional details of enterprise applications, run the dedicated fixlets apart from scheduling software scans. Otherwise, running the fixlets is not required.
- License metrics
  BigFix Inventory provides two types of information about license metrics utilization: aggregated utilization and raw utilization. The former shows utilization of the assigned license metric by all instances of a particular product within the reporting period. However, it is limited to a subset of license metrics. The latter shows data that is collected from .slmtag files. It shows raw utilization of all license metrics that can be used by a particular product. The data is not aggregated and requires further processing.
- Contracts management
  The contracts management group shows all contract-related reports in one place. This allows you to easily manage all your contracts.
  - Creating contract custom fields
    You can customize your contracts by creating custom fields that store your preferred information about the software licenses in your environment. Select an appropriate name for each custom field to reflect its purpose. After you create a custom field, it is available in the Create Contract pane, among other fields that are required to create a contract.
  - Using the Product Metrics per Contract panel
    Starting from version 10.0.11, the All Contracts panel provides an option to navigate to the Product Metrics per Contract panel.
  - Recalculating contracts
    From version 10.0.11, you can recalculate contracts using the Recalculate option in the All Contracts reports panel.
  - Migrating contracts
  - Importing contracts using CSV files
    BigFix Inventory allows you to import contract data through API and Web UI.
  - Hands-on tutorial for contract management
    - Definitions used in contracts operation
      This topic lists important definitions that are used in contract management.
    - Contracts overview
    - Contract features
      This topic describes the panels needed to manage contracts.
    - Considerations before creating a contract
    - Managing product and metric definitions in BigFix Inventory
    - Choosing contract type
    - Assigning products to contracts
    - Assigning a contract to applicable computers
    - Managing contracts with metrics that are not calculated by BigFix Inventory
    - Managing products that are licensed to more than one metric
    - Changing default license usage reporting period
    - Using different license usage reporting periods
    - Managing purchase orders
    - Managing email notifications for contracts that passed through the threshold value
- Software discovery in containers
  BigFix Inventory supports discovery of software in container images through standard discovery methods that includes catalog signatures, template signatures, installation registry and ISO SWID tags to cover traditional model of software deployment.
- Software data harvesting tool

Contracts overview

BigFix Inventory Contract Management feature enables organizations to increase visibility into their software license consumption and to keep licenses compliant. It helps to avoid overusing licenses (a situation where the software license goes beyond the terms agreed in the contract with the supplier). It also helps to optimize software cost by identifying underused licenses.

The diagram below provides an overview of the entire contract management in BigFix Inventory.

Note: In future release, features such as, All Metrics Threshold, Threshold Delta, Metric Custom Fields (panel and added fields), and the related API will be deprecated.

Prerequisites

To access contracts, you must have permission to manage contracts.

Required permission: Manage Contracts