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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.
Software catalogs
To correctly identify components of software products in your infrastructure, ensure that your software catalog is always up-to-date. Periodically import a new 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.
Expanding the custom software catalog
To ensure that all software items that are installed in your infrastructure are discovered, create custom signatures. You can create them from scratch or directly from the Package Data and Scanned File Data reports. You can also create extended signatures to discover software that is not detected by using file or package signatures.
Changing end of support date
Available from 9.2.11. Set or change the end of support date for your software components to have a comprehensive overview of your software inventory.

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.
- Vendor-specific predefined reports
  Vendor-specific predefined 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.
- 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.
- Software catalogs
  To correctly identify components of software products in your infrastructure, ensure that your software catalog is always up-to-date. Periodically import a new 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.
  - Manually updating software catalog
    The software catalog is automatically updated during every upgrade of BigFix Inventory. However, as an exception, you can manually update the software catalog for troubleshooting purposes.
  - Checking product components and their signatures
    You can browse the software catalog to check what components belong to a particular product and what signatures cause that these components are detected.
  - Expanding the custom software catalog
    To ensure that all software items that are installed in your infrastructure are discovered, create custom signatures. You can create them from scratch or directly from the Package Data and Scanned File Data reports. You can also create extended signatures to discover software that is not detected by using file or package signatures.
    - Catalog customization process
      The process of adding custom signatures to the software catalog requires careful planning and consideration. It starts with identifying products that you expect to discover but are not reported or are missing from the software catalog. To correctly identify components of software products in your infrastructure, ensure that your software catalog is always up-to-date. Next, you should organize your work to ensure that the most important products are given the highest priority. Then, you determine what files or packages can be used to detect the software and report its usage. Finally, you can create the signatures.
    - Creating signatures
      You can use the built-in functionality to extend your custom catalog with the software products that are installed in your infrastructure but are not present in the HCL® catalog.
    - Creating signatures from package data
      You can use package data to expand your custom catalog. You can add signatures for software products that are installed in your infrastructure but are not present in the HCL® catalog.
    - Creating signatures from scanned file data
      You can use scanned file data to expand your custom catalog. You can add signatures for software products that are installed in your infrastructure but are not present in the HCL catalog. You identify the file name, or another item of information that can be used to identify the software and add the signature.
    - Adding a new product to software catalog
      The software catalog consists of a list of standard software products. Use the Add Product feature to define a custom product with the accompanying information, such as a publisher name, license metric and release.
    - Assigning an additional metric to a product
      Available from 9.2.8. The pricing calculations are based on the relation between a product and a metric. The software catalog consists of an inventory of standard relations. To define a custom relation, assign one of available metrics to an existing product.
    - Managing license metrics through the UI
      BigFix Inventory allows you to add, modify, and delete metrics through the UI (user interface). You can also perform the same using the REST API, api/sam/v2/metrics as described under Inventory/integration/r_rest_api_for_managing_license_metrics.html.
    - Changing end of support date
      Available from 9.2.11. Set or change the end of support date for your software components to have a comprehensive overview of your software inventory.
    - Software discovery process after customizing the catalog
      Software matching your catalog customizations can be identified in one of the below ways depending on the custom signature.
  - Exporting and importing custom signatures
    You can export custom signatures to an XML file and import them to a different instance of BigFix Inventory to augment you software catalog. It is useful if you maintain separate instances of BigFix Inventory for test and production sites. In such case, you can reuse the custom catalog content instead of creating the new one. You can also import signatures that are published on the signature community or export your custom signatures and contribute them to the community.
  - Deprecated: Synchronizing software catalog content
    You can export your custom catalog content from one instance of BigFix Inventory and import it into another to merge the custom data. It is useful if you maintain separate instances of BigFix Inventory for test and production sites. In such case, you can reuse the custom catalog content instead of creating the new one.
- 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.
- Contract 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

Changing end of support date

9.2.11 Available from 9.2.11. Set or change the end of support date for your software components to have a comprehensive overview of your software inventory.

Before you begin

An icon representing a user. You must have the View Software Catalog and Signatures permission to perform this task.

About this task

BigFix Inventory Server is provided with pre-populated end of supports dates for selected vendors. For the available EOS dates, refer to the BigFix Inventory Release Notes.

It is possible to change the existing date or define the missing dates using this procedure.

Perform the below steps to change the end of support date:

Procedure

In the top navigation bar, click Reports > Software Components.
Select one or more components for which you want to set the end of support date. You can select up to a 100 rows at a time.
Hover over Edit, and click Change End of Support.
Choose the end of support date, and click Change.
Optional: To clear the end of support date, remove the date, and click Change.

Results

You set the end of support date for the selected components.

9.2.12 Starting from application update 9.2.12, end of support date is also displayed on the Software Classification report.

What to do next

You can use end of support dates to filter and sort the report. You can also create a saved report view that is filtered by the specified information, and enable notifications that are triggered when specific criteria are met.

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