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.

Software components that are installed in your infrastructure are discovered in two ways:

By software scans that correlate data collected from the computers with the content of the software catalog
By dedicated fixlets that discover details about specific enterprise applications, and need to be run separately

After the components are discovered, they are assigned to products based on a number of bundling rules. If the initial assignment is not correct, you should adjust it by reassigning components to correct products and metrics, or by excluding products from license calculations. After you complete the classification, you obtain a report that shows what products are installed in your infrastructure, and what is their license metric utilization.

Disclaimer – Discovery of BigFix Inventory components

Software components packaged and covered by BigFix Inventory license are not discovered separately as they do not require classification. Security updates are guarded by BigFix Inventory development process, which includes security scans for vulnerabilities and customer feedback. During each release, BigFix Inventory addresses a number of vulnerabilities, and related security articles are published on the support page. For security issues not listed in the support pages, information is shared on demand.

View the license utilization

To see the list of detected components in your infrastructure and usage information on each computer, refer to Software Installation reports. Use view details about software usage statistics and usage of specific software on the listed instances, use Software Summary report. See also, Available Reports.

This section provides you information about the following:

Vendor-specific reports: Provides vendors of BigFix Inventory customers with a quick access to important statistics across the infrastructure through predefined vendor-specific reports.
Reports: Provides detailed information about the computers in your infrastructure and the software items that are installed on these computers.
Reported license metrics: Lists the supported license metric types and their covered software titles. BigFix Inventory allows you to reuse the metric type for calculating licenses for other software products.

Enterprise application inventory: Lists additional features to detect details of deployment for specific software. It is an extension of standard detection methods to get information about a specific software.

Software classification: Provides report for working with software inventory and its assignment to the licenses (products).
License metrics: Provides report for license utilization.

Software catalogs: Describes the methods to extend provided software catalog with custom entries.