In the first two installments of this blog series, desktop and datacenter inventory requirements and challenges have been reviewed. The main outcome was that it generally requires multiple tools to collect a complete and accurate inventory in most enterprise IT environments. Inventory adapters and APIs to virtualization or cloud technologies are also required, depending on the technologies in use in your IT environment. In this blog, a few discovery and inventory best practices will be articulated to help successfully implement a license management and Software License Optimization program.
Most organizations already have discovery and inventory tools. Leveraging these will lower the cost of any Software License Optimization project. There are a few caveats. The Software License Optimization product must be able to leverage data from different data sources. For instance Microsoft SCCM can be used for configuration management and inventory on Windows devices, IBM Tivoli in the datacenter, and a Mobile Device Management (MDM) tool may be used for intelligent mobile devices. The challenge here is to be able to consolidate data from different data sources into a single repository that will be used for Software License Optimization. Sometimes a configuration management database (CMDB) exists and contains some of the data, but rarely will it have inputs from all of the data sources. In any case, it is usually more efficient and reliable to bring raw data from the disparate inventory sources into the Software License Optimization tool.
Carefully review the inventory data collected by each tool. Typically, 95% of the data provided by inventory tools, such as detailed hardware properties (e.g. video card, disk information, keyboard, etc.) or software components installed (e.g. service packs, drivers, OS patches, etc.) is irrelevant for managing software license compliance. The vast majority of the auto-discovery and inventory tools gather the same data in Windows environments, with the noticeable exceptions of ISO tags and Microsoft Hyper-V configuration information that are only available from a few products. Another area to look at in the Windows environment is usage data; one license optimization technique is to re-harvest licenses for unused software products and this requires usage monitoring. On UNIX and Linux platforms, the capabilities offered by the inventory tool for software identification, virtual machine and hard partition data gathering must be carefully analyzed.
Your existing tools may not provide all of the necessary data: connecting to SAP systems, Oracle databases, hard partitions, processor pools, virtualization, accurate software recognition, etc. on multiple platforms are not features available in many inventory tools. Rather than simply adding new inventory products to your toolset, the Software License Optimization tool should be able to deliver these missing data points and aggregate all of the data from multiple tools. Each tool requires training, maintenance, and support; reducing the number of tools will ease the Software License Optimization project and limit the cost associated with it. If the software license management tool is able to perform agentless inventory, this technique can be used on servers to limit the impact and footprint of the tool.
Some devices may be covered by multiple inventory tools. In this case, the Software License Optimization tool must be able to either pick the most accurate data source or be able to complement one source with data from other sources. A typical scenario where multiple data sources exist is when the primary inventory tool is migrated from one tool to another one or across releases. In this case some devices will coexist in both tools for some time. Another scenario is where hardware inventory data is provided by a device based inventory tool, but specific additional application measurements are also required: for example, Oracle databases using a processor based license need information related to the device hosting the application, virtualization/partition data, as well as inventory of management packs and options that must be performed by querying the database.
Most organizations do not have to purchase and deploy a new discovery and inventory tool when implementing Software License Optimization. With adapters to existing configuration management and inventory tools, access to virtualization data via APIs, and additional inventory capabilities delivered by the Software License Optimization tool, organizations should be in position to collect all of the necessary data. The best strategy is to understand what data sources are available within the organization and use them first. Then, deploy and use the additional features of the license management and Software License Optimization tool when necessary.
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To learn more, please visit our website and read about the comprehensive discovery and inventory capabilities in Flexera Software’s FlexNet Manager Suite for Enterprises.
Readers may also be interested in viewing our on-demand webinar series: Software License Optimization 4-part Webinar Series. Part 2 discusses discovery, inventory and application recognition.