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.
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.
Collecting the data
The section provides information on how to perform different tasks to collect data from Oracle.
Masking sensitive information in the Oracle ZIP package
The ZIP package contains a significant amount of potentially sensitive information gathered across all the nodes where Oracle software is installed. That information includes:

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.
  - Collecting the data
    The section provides information on how to perform different tasks to collect data from Oracle.
    - Schedule Oracle Data collection scans
    - Configuring VM Managers
    - Manually collect data from the database
    - Downloading Oracle ZIP package
    - Reviewing Oracle ZIP package
    - Masking sensitive information in the Oracle ZIP package
      The ZIP package contains a significant amount of potentially sensitive information gathered across all the nodes where Oracle software is installed. That information includes:
    - Sending Oracle ZIP package to Oracle if required
- 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.
- 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

Masking sensitive information in the Oracle ZIP package

The ZIP package contains a significant amount of potentially sensitive information gathered across all the nodes where Oracle software is installed. That information includes:

User names
Host names, machine IDs, and IP addresses

Oracle requires that all the masked items are traceable that means, for example, that each time the specific host name is masked, the same key is used, so across all the appearances of the specific key, we can track that it refers to one specific host name. This data anonymization will also be non-reversible.

The BigFix Inventory server includes a tool that meets the above requirements.

Note: Due to the complexity of the data gathered, the mechanism can miss important pieces. It is strongly advised to review the masked package before sending it outside. If the gap is beyond a manual fix, contact BigFix support.

To run the tool, a user requires root access to the BFI Server filesystem. Scripts are located as:

Windows:\Program Files\BigFix Enterprise\BFI\wlp\bin\

Linux: /opt/BFI/wlp/bin/

Example usage:

bfiUtility.bat maskOracleAuditingData --inputFile="INPUT_PATH" --outputFile="OUTPUT_PATH"

Instead of INPUT_PATH, put the full path of the file to be processed. The file will not be changed during the processing. Instead of OUTPUT_PATH, put the full path of the output file. The file will be overwritten.