Features and functions

Software discovery and identification

BigFix Inventory scans your infrastructure to determine what software is installed on the monitored computers.

Signature discovery and creation

BigFix Inventory includes a catalog of software products along with a set of rules called signatures. The signatures are matched against the results of the scan to build a complete overview of software that is installed in your infrastructure.

Software usage counting

BigFix Inventory provides you with information about how software that is installed in your enterprise is used.

Reports

Reports contain 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.

Contracts

Contracts are used to manage information about licenses for the software products that are installed in your infrastructure and to track spending that is associated with those licenses. A contract contains information about the cost of acquiring and maintaining a license, as well as its entitlement start and end dates.

IBM license compliance

BigFix Inventory provides the information that is needed to ensure compliance with processor value units (PVU), and resource value units (RVU MAPC) audit reports licensing terms.

BigFix Inventory calculates the maximum core capacity of the server that is available to the installed IBM software. The application also determines the number of processor value units (PVU) or processor-core entitlements that are required. If you deploy a supported virtualization technology, the tool provides processor core capacity information for the whole virtualized environment.

IBM license usage monitoring

You can generate PVU and RVU MAPC audit reports that show the product and processor value units. The audit reports can be viewed in the application or printed.