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.

There are two types of the software catalog:
  • Catalog provided by BigFix that contains signatures for BigFix products as well as signatures for a range of products from vendors such as Microsoft or Oracle.
  • Custom catalog that contains signatures created manually to discover products that are not contained in the catalog provided by BigFix.
These two catalogs are fully independent. If you create a custom signature to discover a product and then a signature for that product is delivered in the BigFix catalog, the two signatures are not merged. If the same product is discovered by both signatures, the number of discovered instances might be higher than the number of instances that are installed. In such case, delete the custom signature. For more information, see: Catalog problems.