Home
Software inventory and license utilization
You can classify the discovered software so that reports in BigFix InventoryBigFix 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.
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.

Software inventory and license utilization
You can classify the discovered software so that reports in BigFix InventoryBigFix 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. 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.
- 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.
  - 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.
- 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

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.

Before you begin

Important: 9.2.11

9.2.11

Starting from application update 9.2.11.0, you can no longer export the software catalog with your custom content from the Catalog Upload panel. As an alternative, you can export your custom signatures and import them onto the other instance of BigFix Inventory using the Catalog Customization panel. For more information, see: Exporting and importing custom signatures.

An icon representing a user.

You must have the Manage Catalogs permission to perform this task.

Restriction:

The catalog is exported in to the native format. This format overwrites the existing catalog, so it can be imported only into a fresh installation of BigFix Inventory before the initial import.
You can transfer custom catalog content only between two instances of BigFix Inventory if they have the same version.

About this task

When you export the custom catalog content from BigFix Inventory, an XML file that contains all catalog entries is saved to your computer. Then, you must log in to the instance of BigFix Inventory to which you want to import the custom catalog content and upload the XML file.

Procedure

Log in to the instance of BigFix Inventory from which you want to export the custom catalog content.
In the top navigation bar, click Management > Catalog Upload.
In the Catalog Export section, click Export. An XML file with your custom catalog content is saved to your computer.
Log in to the instance of BigFix Inventory to which you want to import the custom catalog content.
In the top navigation bar, click Management > Catalog Upload.
Click Browse, select the XML file with your custom catalog content, and click Upload.

Results

The software catalog file is listed in the table. The status is Pending until you go to Management > Imports, and click Import Now to process new changes.