Home
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.
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.

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.
  - Discovering Microsoft SQL Server Edition
    It is important to discover an edition of Microsoft SQL Server for measuring the license utilization. When components of SQL Server are installed on Windows, the installer of SQL Server does not put information about edition of this product in the Windows Uninstallation Registry. Initiate Software Scan fixlet collects the edition information from Windows Server configuration stored in Windows Registry. This edition information is added into Windows Package information available in BigFix Inventory and used by signatures for Microsoft SQL Server components.
  - Extended discovery of Oracle Database
    You can retrieve granular information about the edition (Standard or Enterprise), options, Management Packs (including Oracle Real Application Cluster, RAC), and user concurrent sessions of Oracle Databases that are deployed in your environment. When you combine this information with the collected hardware inventory data, you can use it to calculate the demand for Oracle Database licenses. The functionality is supported for Oracle Database versions 11.2, 12.1, 18.3, 19.0, and 21.0
  - Discovering Microsoft Exchange edition
    Available from 9.2.6. To retrieve detailed information about Microsoft Exchange servers that are installed in your infrastructure, run the Get Microsoft Exchange Edition fixlet. The data is collected, imported to BigFix Inventory, and displayed in the Software Installations report.
  - Measuring license metric utilization of VMware products
    Available from 9.2.7. BigFix Inventory allows you to retrieve granular information about license metric utilization of VMware vCenter and vSphere in your infrastructure. The resource utilization data is collected by the VM Manager Tool and displayed on the Resource Utilization report.
  - Discovering and measuring SAP
    You can discover components of SAP Business Suite that are installed on Linux and AIX computers in your infrastructure. You can also collect license metric utilization data from SAP landscapes and integrate it with your other resources on the Resource Utilization report. Discovery and measuring are two separate processes that do not impact each other.
  - Assigning components to active BigFix products <deprecated>
- 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.
- 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

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.

Software identification tag files for enterprise applications are stored in the following directories:

BESClient/LMT/ORACLE
BESClient/LMT/SAP
BESClient/LMT/MS/exchange

The software identification tag path that is provided in BigFix Inventory shows the product installation path, and the tag name.

9.2.9 Starting from application update 9.2.9, the software identification tag path and installation path are shown separately on condition that the paths are different and the tag contains information about the installation path. Paths to software identification tags discovered before version 9.2.9 might also be updated after the upgrade on condition that sufficient data is available.