Evaluating the Health of Your Software Asset Management Technology Solution

Jean Agnew:

So thanks everyone for joining this afternoon. My name is Jean Agnew and I’m the manager here at Anglepoint, SAM Technical Operations Group. We provide health checks for each of the major SAM technology solutions and my specialty is on the operations side of Flexera and the Snow tools.

But as you can see, I have quite a few of my team members with me. I think actually one is missing. I think Chris is missing. I think he’s out sick, but I will let each one of them quickly introduce themselves and which tool they work on.

So Diane,

Diane Frost:

Hi, my name is Diane Frost. And my tool specialty is ServiceNow and I’ve been working with ServiceNow for about eight or nine years now. And in asset management, both the service part of it and the IT asset management for maybe 25 years. So that’s my role.

Jean Agnew:

Yep. Thanks Diane. Do we have Don on?

Don Helliwell:

Yes, I’m on and I just got audio. So are we doing intros? Yes.

Jean Agnew:

Just quick intro of what SAM tool you work on.

Don Helliwell:

So I work on Flexera products and I’ve been doing that for nearly seven years now. FNMS the Flexera One products at broker at portal data platform. So lots of products have been doing that for the last half dozen years.

Jean Agnew:

Great. Thanks Don. Andrei.

Andrei Marghioala:

Hi, I’m Andrei. I’m working on Flexera as well for the last I believe six years. Since 2015. I’ve been on both implementation but also operational in I’ve been providing reports for Microsoft, Oracle and other tier one vendors. And I’m now on the technical side overseeing the implementation and different connectors and tools for Flexera.

Jean Agnew:

Great, thanks Andrei. Amber.

Amber Ostler:

Hi, I focus on the ServiceNow Sam Pro Health Checks as well as Aspera Smart Track, or more recently named USU License Management.

Jean Agnew:

Great. Thanks Amber. And am I correct we don’t have Chris on the line? I’m not hearing him. I think he’s out today. Sick. Okay, great. Thanks. So as you can see, here’s the agenda for today’s webinar.

We’re going to begin to talk about trustworthy data. Then we’re going to look at the devices that are being inventoried. The attributes that go along with them following will be the applications that your tool can recognize. And then we’re going to talk a lot more about the other items that need to be considered when doing a health check.

Then I’ll follow up and explain what clients get when Anglepoint conducts a health check for you. And then finally, we’ll end with questions and answers and then, next steps. But before we begin, we’d like to take a quick poll and so I think, Braden, you have the poll questions.

Okay. So where is your organization in SAM Technology Lifecycle? Just one. Choose one. So are you researching the solutions right now? Are you in the middle of implementing a solution? Have you had a solution that’s been implemented for less than one year or finally a solution that’s been implemented for more than one year, and then, or you don’t have a solution and you’re not considering any solutions.

So we’ll just take a couple minutes and if you could vote, I’d appreciate it.

Okay. Let’s see. Oh, here we go. Okay, so it looks like we have 32 people at least right now that voted. It looks like, wow, a good percentage of you have had it for more than one year, so that’s great. And then a few are pretty new to the SAM solutions or researching the SAM solutions. If you have any questions, you can certainly reach out to us.

We have a service that provides information on the different SAM tools. If you’re, curious and then it looks smaller amounts are implementing the solution right now or for less than one year. So, it’s great that you’re here. So welcome and then we have one more poll and that is what SAM Technology Solution does your organization have? And again if you are just now implementing, you can go ahead and select that. We don’t have a technology solution, but we obviously put the four big ones and then space for others. So we’ll take a minute and let you vote there.

Okay. Let’s see. Okay. Pretty even split between FNMS and SAM Pro. With SAM Pro being a little bit more, which I’m not surprised, I’m seeing a lot more people with SAM Pro come a little bit lower with Snow and USU. Okay. Other, interesting. And again, there’s the people out there that don’t have a solution.

You’re researching it. Okay, great. Let’s go ahead and get on with the webinar. So let’s start with trustworthy data. There we go. As all of trustworthy data is essential for your SAM tool, and we really want to know, do you know if yours is clean and reliable? And a lot of us don’t when we first start down this journey.

I want to start by talking about all the different types of inventory that are necessary in order for you to get good, effective license positions or ELPs. First, as most of you probably understand different inventory sources come through the different adapters, connectors, integrations, lots of different names, but they’ll come through your tools, beacon or mid server.

And then of course you’ll be able to access it through your interface, but you have to determine if these sources are having any issues. Sometimes there are failures that are really obvious and you can see that it failed, but other times you really have to dig into the data to see if you’re having problems.

So on you, you can see on the slide that we have many different types of inventory that should be coming into your tool. So let’s start with any assets and the devices. Are the number of your devices that you’re expecting being inventoried, that’s going to be your, number one thing. Are you getting what you’re expecting?

And then if you are getting those devices, are you getting the attributes that should be collected that you absolutely need in order to do your ELP? So, are you getting the names of the devices? Because a lot of times the name of the device is, giving you an idea if it’s in your prod or test or dev environment.

So knowing your naming conventions is really important. The type of device, whether it’s a laptop, desktop, workstation, virtual host, a virtual machine or a host server are you getting your serial numbers, your manufacturing, your model numbers? Because those are important for certain tools to know if you’re getting duplicates of some of those assets, but they’re important for other reasons as well.

Numbers of processors, course threads, hard drives, all of that. Good hardware detail information is it coming in because if it’s a processor license or a core license, you absolutely need that information in order to make sure that your licensing is correct. Are you getting processor type, brand disk space your environment?

Is the environment coming in correct? Is the role of the device obviously. Different tools have different names. So environment or role it’s telling what that device is being used for. Is it being used for production, test, dev, QA, passa, failover? All of that is, is extremely important and we’ll get into that later on.

Is the status coming in correctly? Is everything showing as active? That could be a problem because you could have some retired or decommissioned devices that are still showing up and you don’t want that either. Is your assigned and calculated user information coming in?

And then finally, certain tools. If you want to restrict licenses, you may need to make sure that on your device, that the appropriate location or call center or corporate unit or whatever your tools name might be in order to do those restrictions, are they coming in on your devices? Now users is a second source inventory source that I is important for your tool.

Are the number of active users that you’re expecting being inventoried, are they actually coming in? Are you getting duplicates? Are some of the other user attributes that you want to make sure collected like status? And that’s. Is the user still active? Are they on some sort of medical leave? Have they retired or left the organization, but they’re still showing up as an active user?

All of that makes a difference because, if you are licensing things by total users and you’re giving a number, Of, users that have left the organization and you’re overbuying. Then we’re going to go to applications. No, before I jump there, I want to just talk about email addresses.

So sometimes if you want to first you want to make sure email addresses are coming in because a lot of the SaaS publishers now, really have the email address that links to your internal users. So you want to make sure that your tool ha is gathering the email addresses. Sometimes multiple email addresses may be necessary in order for the licensing to work out of the box with that solution.

So now let’s go ahead and jump over to the third, one of the third inventory sources, really applications. It’s not just about the devices and the users, but what’s actually installed out in your environment. Are you collecting all of that and are you collecting all of those attributes?

Like the product name, the manufacturer, the classification of that application is important because, as a SAM program, you are concerned about commercial software that you need a license for. And usually, you’re not as concerned about freeware, betas, things like that. But there may be security reasons that you would want to know about those other applications, and you wouldn’t want them authorized within your environment.

So it’s good to have an idea what the classification is on those applications that are installed in your environment. And then finally the last piece is your vCenter data. So this is what provides you the insight into your virtualized environment, the devices, and their relationships. So are you getting all the V centers that you know of that are.

In your environment, are you getting all that inventory in? If you’re not, then you need to go and make sure you get those connections hooked up so then you can start getting and seeing the cluster names, the host names, and the v relationships with those. I forgot to mention that.

We’ll hold questions to the end, as questions come up, feel free to put it into the chat and we’ll get to those at the end. I know I’m going fast I want to make sure that we have enough time, so we’ll go ahead and now let’s move on to some additional information on those devices.

One of the main reasons for Sam is to avoid compliance issues with publishers especially when they decide to audit you. So when publishers audit you, they expect that your tool is gathering about 95% of your environment that all of those machines, about 95% of them are being inventoried.

So I know a lot of people that I talk to, they think they know what their numbers are, but do they really know, have they actually confirmed it with source data? And so it’s really important to know what that. Total number of devices, and that’s your physicals, your virtuals, your desktops, your servers to have that idea exactly what your number is, and then know what that percentage is to be able to confirm that, that your tool is pulling in at least 95% of your environment.

So the first step, if you’re not sure what your number is then what I would say is if you don’t know, you’ve got to go and find out. We recommend that first talk to your technical team, talk to the server and desktop admins, maybe even the help desk. Then there’s a variety of other sources that you can go to and have reports run in order to try to figure out, because if you just rely on the tool, you may have missed some devices if you just rely on say RV tools? You’re just getting your virtualized environment. If you are relying just solely on active directory, then you’re just getting your Windows environment, so you know, there’s SQL scripts you could run. There are some other internal reports that I am sure the Unix and Linux admins have that, I’m sure there’s a Mac person that you can contact to say, okay, hey, it’s not coming in.

The Macs aren’t coming in. How many Macs do we have out there? Your CMDB is a great source, but as we all know, sometimes those aren’t as up to date as we’d like it. So you have to look at all of those sources and then come up with that number that you believe and then make sure your tool is bringing in at least 95% of that number.

One of the things here I wanted to talk about is that as I said, you want to make sure that you’re considering all devices. And I know that a lot of times there are certain parts of your environment first of all, you have different domains. You might have subsidiaries that have different domains.

Are you bringing in all of those? From those different domains, are there any environments where inventory agents aren’t allowed to be installed? And how do you account for those when you’re going through your ELP? So you just want to remember that of those, devices that can’t be inventoried via tool.

How are you including them? Make sure there’s a process so you don’t forget about them, and you do include those numbers when looking at publisher ELP. Now once you believe you’re at 95%, there could still be other issues. And that is, and I mentioned this earlier, could you have some devices that are all coming in as active, but really you have some as retired.

So why? Why? It’s important to be able to recognize that some of these devices are actually retired is because if you keep them as active, then that’s over consuming on either your SAM solutions licenses, because I’m sure every SAM solution you’re paying a per device or per seat type of charge.

So you, you could be paying more than what you have to if you have those retired computers and servers in your environment, but also all of the commercial software that’s installed on all of those are also consuming those commercial licenses. So really important that you get that cleaned up within your environment and within the tool.

And then finally, you also want to make sure that you’re getting the associated device role as I mentioned earlier, because there are many publishers that even though it may not be a compliance issue, if you don’t have the correct device, role or environment associated with it, you are not optimizing your licensing that you’re paying for with those different publishers.

So a lot of publishers, if it’s a test or dev server and you already own a production license, that production license will cover your testing dev servers. So you want to make sure you’re optimizing and not overspending. In that area. And then also are you seeing duplicate devices out there with same names and same serial numbers.

Again, you are just overspending. So you want to look for those types of things in your in your SAM solution. So now let’s go ahead and jump over to application recognition.

Okay. So all SAM solutions recognize thousands of applications. However, not every application is or even can be recognized. So if you believe your solutions providing you a hundred percent that of your inventory, you’re probably incorrect on that. So applications have what a lot of the tool manufacturers consider as evidence signatures or recognition rules, and, their teams have built their libraries with those that evidence signatures and recognition rules for those applications.

But there’s always new ones coming in, all new versions, additions, and, for them to be able to stay up on it to the minute it is sometimes impossible. So what happens is some of those that evidence gets is more un unrecognized or, they don’t have a recognition rule built for it.

So you as the SAM team need to make sure that you are recognizing all of the applications installed in your environment. And some of them, some of the time it’s not happening because that signature or evidence hasn’t been linked to the application. So what you can do is actually what we recommend here at Anglepoint is first thing would be to send that evidence to the content team at the different software SAM publishers or SAM tool vendors, and ask them if they can put it into their content library and so you wouldn’t have to do the manual part of doing that. So that would be our first recommendation is ask them to do it.

And, but only ask them one publisher at a time. Don’t ask them for every piece of unrecognized or unknown evidence or recognition that they’ve seen. You’ll, you won’t get the information back in a timely manner. Only do one publisher, one priority publisher at a time and get that. Done before moving on to a second.

So that’s the first thing. If you don’t have time to wait, usually you’re able to do that yourself and link it up to an existing application or create your own application out of the box or, by yourself without going through the actual software publisher. Let me see here. And so that would be, again, if the evidence, the signatures are, have been recognized, and you can usually do that yourself.

Now let’s flip to the other option where, okay. Something has been installed in your environment. An application’s there, but you don’t see that evidence or those recognition rules, and it’s probably because the tool is unable. To identify that. And of course, I’m sure many of you are familiar with SaaS applications, right?

You don’t have any actual evidence or any kind of install that happens on your local machines. So obviously your SAM tool’s not going to be able to obtain that evidence or that footprint of that application. So in those cases you’re going to have to, how do you measure the consumption for those products?

It sometimes can’t be using your SAM tool. It will have to be other ways. And so what you know, we recommend is that you actually go talk to the product owner. They might be able to give you the consumption information. Consumption information is usually collected through various scripts. Maybe screenshots, user lists.

The IBM authorized user list, for an IBM product is owned by that product owner and they have the list and they can provide you that list or through the application portals for SaaS licensing. Know that your tool can’t give you a hundred percent, but that you will have to, at times, go outside the tool in order to get that consumption information.

Okay. Some other considerations that we look at when we complete a health check and there’s quite a few, as you’ll see. Okay, so one of the main things that we look at are upgrades needed for your beacon mid servers or your tool agents. Because every time they release an upgrade, you may not need it, but there may be added functionality.

In this agents that you want to take advantage of, you certainly don’t want old, really old agents out there. And you want to have everything supported. So you may want to go and look at, say, a yearly basis to see if you need these upgrades. Are there issues with any of your connector’s integration?

Like I said, some of these you can see right away. Some you might not see that there’s some problems until you start digging into the information. Are there any job failures? Are there any additional licenses needed for your SAM tool? So if you don’t have enough licenses for your SAM tool, sometimes you don’t see all your inventory, they’ll shut off the inventory coming in.

So you’re not, if you’re doing ELPs, you are not giving an accurate ELP because you’re not actually seeing all of your inventory. Are your contents libraries being updated regularly? Are reconciliation failures occurring in your environment? Are you obtaining software usage? This information’s important.

If you want to look at those applications that aren’t being used and that could possibly be reclaimed so you don’t order, new software when you really can just reclaim the existing software that you have. If people aren’t using it, are there entitlement, import errors or unprocessed purchases? Because if you are doing an ELP and you believe it’s correct, but then you don’t realize that you actually owned more licenses that you just forgot about and you didn’t either enter in or when you entered them in, they got import errors, or they’re just sitting there being unprocessed.

So you want to be able to make sure you’re. Getting all of your entitlements in so you can get an accurate position. If your tool is being re used as a replacement for ILMT, one of the conditions for it is that a hundred percent of your IBM servers have the tools agent installed.

So if you are not confirming that all your IBM servers are coming in with your tools agent, you could be out of compliance with IBM, same thing. If your tool is Oracle verified and you’re doing an ELP for your database, options and packs are the Oracle database servers installed with your tools agent.

It’s your tools agent that has the scripts that LMS uses in order to, identifying and capture an inventory all of your database options and packs. So if you don’t have the tools agent and then they’re just coming in from SEC, SCCM, or something else, again, you’re not going to have an accurate position.

Are there partially normalized discovery models or normalization suggestions that you haven’t looked at? You should probably do that. Are the device life cycle status and environments, we’ve talked about this pretty important. Are they coming in? Do you have a if not, what’s your process in order to make sure that you’re optimizing your licensing and you’re not over purchasing more than what you actually need?

In FlexNet Manager, there’s something called recommended license changes. That’s, when something gets changed in their content library, that’s them letting you know, hey, this changed. You should probably go and look and see if you want to accept it. And then in CMP there’s something that you know, hey, if you make custom products And now the library’s recognizing it, and you can go back and say, yep, I want to accept the content library’s version of this.

Those are all things you need to take into consideration, and you should be looking at within your tool. And then finally, are you configuring all your license? Licenses or your entitlements with the appropriate use rates. Are like your upgrade and downgrade rates, your virtualization rates, your secondary multiple use rates.

All of those great use rates that allow you to consume more of your installs, then you would if you didn’t have those use rights. If you’re not maximizing all of them, then you’re not maximizing your investment in both your software and in your SAM solution.

Okay, let’s look at the deliverables you’re going to get with a health check from Anglepoint. So there are two deliverables that we provide our clients. The first is the health check scorecard and it provides you with the items that we’re reviewing, along with the results. If you continue to have anglepoint, do periodic health checks or if you decide to do your own, you would have it so that way you would be able to show the trending of any issues that you’ve identified.

And then once we do identify issues, we’re also providing you a finding and a. Recommendation or remediation report and it is provided to assist your team in making the changes so you can, start to safely trust your SAM tool data, allowing you to gain better value from your SAM solution.

Okay. So just want to ask if there are any questions out there and I see, looks like we might have one. Can someone look at that and see what it is?

Moderator:

Yeah. Jean, we had a one question come in about how often, like as far as what is a recommended frequency for a health check or an evaluation? What you explained.

Jean Agnew:

Okay. So typically, this is what I would believe. Now everyone might have a different opinion about it. And if I have Don or Andrei or Diane, you guys want to if you have a different opinion, but in my opinion, it would be bi-yearly for a full health check.

It’d have someone actually come in and look at your tool on a bi-yearly basis. So twice a year. But really there are items that you should be looking at on, a weekly, at least a weekly or monthly basis different items. Because obviously if you are having connector issues or beacon issues you may stop getting inventory altogether.

So you certainly don’t want to find that out only every six months. Don, Andrei, Diane, any other opinions?

Don Helliwell:

Yeah, I go ahead Andrei.

Andrei Marghioala:

Oh, okay. Sorry for taking over. I would say it depends about the vendor and about what you find there. Because if you are actually finding a big non-compliance on one of the primary vendors, you would actually try to do an internal audit every three months.

And see how the fixing thing, right? Then removing the software, the non-comp compliancy actually works over the three months period. So it depends on the situation. Usually it’s six months, right? But in some cases, you would need to do it every three months and to really drive the project to clean up and to remove the non-compliance.

Don Helliwell:

Great. And to a add to that, I would say that there are some things that you should be reviewing, not in the context of a health check, but looking to make sure. On a daily, or at least a weekly basis, that your beacons are reporting properly and you’re not seeing any issues. And this course is speaking of FNMS, but making sure that all of the system tasks are completing properly for whatever tool you might be using.

So you, there are things to do daily, weekly, monthly. If there, if your environment’s really clean, functional, twice a year is great. Otherwise, you might want to do it more frequently. Yeah. To address the issues that you’ve found and then follow up to see if that also reveals any new issues. It varies from your environment to another client’s environment.

Diane Frost:

Yeah, Don. And I’d like to follow that with saying if you are doing your daily and weekly reviews, that when you do that biannual health check, you should see significant improvements in the results of those health checks.

So even if you are doing those daily, weekly things, when you do the overall broader health check, it gives you a higher level picture of your entire environment. So it will validate the fact that you’re doing that work, I guess is what I’m saying.

Jean Agnew:

That’s great. Thanks guys. Do we have any other questions, Braden?

Moderator:

Yeah. Another question that came through was how much has application recognition improved over the last few years?

Jean Agnew:

So I, I think that’s going to obviously be dependent by tool. So some may have made larger advances than others. I’m not sure if I can really answer that. Like I said, there’s always going to be some applications that none of the tools can actually inventory. They just, they haven’t figured out how to do for everything yet.

Diane Frost:

I’d like to say for ServiceNow point of view that for the last couple upgrades, particularly Rome and San Diego that they put a lot of effort into the SAM portion of the tool. And the hardware portion, but particularly in the SAM portion of the tool. And I would venture to say that they’re, the things that they added have fairly significantly, it increased the ability for it to find things. And hopefully they’re going to keep going that direction, but it was ignored for a while. I was pleased to see them putting the focus on it that they did.

Don Helliwell:

And for Flexera, they are updating. Almost weekly, their application recognition library, pulling in new applications, new additions things like that. So very frequently they’re updating, it’s one of their key selling points.

Moderator:

Yeah, we can do that. Yeah. So this one says based on findings and remediation, does Anglepoint then provide an SOW for the next level of engagement? If we want to take advantage of help with configuration or receive better value from the tool?

Jean Agnew:

Yeah, absolutely. So we provide the findings and remediation report that gives you what issues were found and how those can be fixed. But absolutely, if you want us to do the fixing, we can certainly, write up a new SOW for that new work, or, I know I’ve seen it also, where you can just create one sow and then, have us do the work.

Don Helliwell:

So it can be done immediately through the first SOW or as we’re doing that, to guide you through what needs fixing, obviously in the remediation report, how to do it, and to give some on the job training while we’re doing it, if that’s something you want.

Jean Agnew:

Yep. So we can work with you however you need.

Moderator:

That’s great. Yeah. We another question that came in is do you have a checklist of what items should be reviewed and how often those items should be reviewed?

Jean Agnew:

Yeah we could, that would be part of, I would say some of the work information. So we could certainly help you out by providing you some information.

If you have a managed service with us, we could definitely provide that information to you.

But there’s so many little things that you have to, as you saw in the webinar, there’s so many little items that you have to check off. To make sure that you are one, getting all the inventory that you should be getting, making sure that what, what’s coming in is coming in with all the fields you need that you’re not getting that duplicate information.

And it’s just, checking a lot of the different reports and the views. And one thing that I think I forgot, which is surprising that I forgot this, but, looking at inventory I did talk about this, that is been retired or decommissioned and sometimes, it doesn’t say that it’s retired or decommissioned.

So how do you know or how do you start looking to find out? Some of the reports that you can run. For like last inventory date or out of date inventory. So you start looking at that stuff and do you need to do that on a weekly basis? Probably not, but monthly or quarterly at least.

Great.

Moderator:

Great. We did, we had one more question come through or looks like a couple more now, but one is, what is Anglepoint’s definition of an application? Is this Out of Box software or a company specific business application in the CMDB? And could you give an example?

Don Helliwell:

I’ll go ahead and answer that one.

Okay. So the answer is both really out of the box for sure. Can it be a homegrown business application that any of your companies may have created? Absolutely. If there’s evidence, the the Flexera inventory agent in particular is likely to find it. And if it does find it, you’ll see that in the evidence lists.

You can create a manual application, call it whatever you like version tracking and everything to assign. To the send the evidence to that application so it can be tracked going forward so you can make sure that those homegrown apps are being updated or have at least the right version for, particular operating system or whatever.

I hope that answers the question, but basically it’s a yes, at least in f and m s. Now, I don’t know about Software one or any of the rest. Maybe some of the rest of you can speak up for that.

Diane Frost:

For ServiceNow, I would agree with you that it’s a yes, but there’s an additional caveat that I’d like to point out that in ServiceNow, the default is to submit all of the applications that are discovered to the content library for crowdsourcing reviews.

So the ServiceNow can maintain the content library with as much content as possible. If you have a proprietary application that you do not want to share with the world, you have the option to choose not to share it with ServiceNow on an application by application basis. So you can do it both ways.

You can manage it just completely internally for those things that are proprietary to you, and then you can manage the rest of the public, let us call that software applications through the crowdsourcing type functionality that the content library from ServiceNow provides.

Don Helliwell:

Good point. And that does apply to Flexera product as well.

Moderator:

Great. Okay. One more question here and hopefully I will read this correctly, but the question is what drives the software health check? Operations allocation tracking. Or software discovery versus software procurement intake.

Jean Agnew:

Can you read that one more time? I’m not sure if I understood it, but maybe you know anyone else on the call?

Moderator:

Yeah. I’ll go. So it says, what drives the software health check and then I’m assuming it means, is it operations allocation tracking. Or is it software discovery versus software procurement intake?

Jean Agnew:

What drives a health check is you know, that you want to make sure that your inventory is coming in, that you are hopefully because those are some of the items that are more technical, that you need to make sure that nothing is broken and that everything’s coming incorrectly.

Where on the entitlement side, you have a lot of control on the entitlements or licenses that you’re putting into the tool, so typically you don’t have to do as much of a health check on those. However, in today’s webinar, I definitely mentioned that you should look. At some of your licenses and entitlements and see if they’re being, one put in correctly.

Are getting the right license type or metric in, on that license? Are you setting the use rights correctly so you are not, or the app the licensed in sense of, I have. All these use rights, but I don’t have them set. So I’m not taking advantage of my virtualization rights or my upgrade rights and I’m actually then needing more licenses than what I really technically need.

You really do need a technical health check and somewhat of an operational health check when it comes to your licenses. So would you agree with that, Dawn?

Don Helliwell:

Yeah. Part of the question though is versus software procurement intake. So getting the purchase information properly imported into any of the tools is equally as important as the inventory or the discovery is.

They definitely go hand in hand.

I just, I don’t see as many clients that actually have their procurement information, even though some of the tools can do it. I just normally don’t see it as automated as it’s more of a manual, in my opinion. Usually it is. Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully that answered that question for you and Jean,

Diane Frost:

I would agree with you that right now it’s mostly manual, but I think that the tendency is going to be to automate more and more of that.

Jean Agnew:

Yeah, I think it’s great if you can, as much automation as possible. It looks like we have more questions rated.

Moderator:

Yeah, yeah, we do. A couple more came in. How should you distinguish between direct business applications, software versus supportive software components such as OS, DB appliances, et cetera?

Don Helliwell:

That’s kind of a licensing question really. The business applications yes are very important. Jean I would go back to on this, talking about prioritizing. The license activities going by vendor, whether it’s the largest spend or the upcoming audit, or any other driver of how you would deal with those applications to make sure that you’re.

Getting the correct information for those business applications. Obviously you’re going to get the operating system that’s going to come in probably for any tool as it should database. It depends on the version Oracle database. I know Flexera can pick up the Oracle database. The options. And management packs quite well.

Don’t know about the other tools, appliances true appliance is a different animal. Generally, you cannot install an agent on those, so if you’re going to include appliances, everything about it is going to be manual, but IT appliances are usually licensed by themselves. So it, it covers all applications that are installed.

Anybody care to add to that?

Jean Agnew:

No, I think you did a great job. Hopefully that answered that question for you.

Moderator:

All right. And then we have one more that we’ll do. And this is when conducting a health check to identify all active devices, what if the CMDB is deemed inaccurate or contains duplicates?

What is considered a clean CMDB in the eyes of an auditor?

Jean Agnew:

So the auditor’s not going well, I guess I’m not a hundred percent sure about that, but I, they’re, they’ll be looking at the reports you’re pulling from your actual tool. They won’t know that your source was CMDB for some of that information.

But yeah I honestly, If you’re going to be using your CMDB as a source for some of that lifecycle information and role or environment, and it’s not the best, source data, again, this goes back to my first slide of trustworthy data. If you put junk in, you’re going to get junk out.

So you want to make sure all of your sources are clean before you put them into your tool. Anyone have any more opinions about CMDB and. Sure. Clean forces.

Don Helliwell:

Sure. I’ve never seen a clean CMDB. Yeah, there, it’s, so what I would do whatever your inventory agent is, hopefully it is a good, accurate inventory agent.

Compare that with your CMDB data can be imported. From your CMDB into most of the existing tools that are out there and vice versa, it can be used to also help clean up by exporting data back to the CMDB to help improve the accuracy of the CMDB. Will it get rid of duplicates? No. Probably not, but will it help the accuracy?

Almost certainly. And it depends on what your source is that you’re presenting to the auditor. If you don’t have a tool like SAM Pro or FNMS Flexera one, whatever your CMDB is what your auditor’s going to be looking at, but they’re going to be asking for specific information.

If Microsoft is coming in or Oracle, they’re only concerned about Oracle or IBM for IBM software. So you’re going to have to prove to them that you have good inventory resource, and they’re probably, if you don’t have a good inventory source, they’re probably going to say, here, we want you to run these scripts on your systems and get the information that way.

A lot of clients don’t like vendors to do that, it’s a risk of an audit.

Jean Agnew:

Any other questions? I think we’ve probably, hopefully answered all of them.

Moderator:

Yeah. Yeah, it looks like that’s it and if people have follow up questions, they’re welcome to reach out to us after the webinar.

Jean Agnew:

Okay. And we do just have one more poll question we’d like to ask.

So after attending this webinar, how healthy do you believe your SAM technology solution is? So not healthy, somewhat healthy or very healthy?

Give a minute here.

Okay. And it looks like, okay, so about 22% of you think that your tools are either healthy or very healthy. The larger majority is somewhat healthy and not healthy, and that is what we would expect. That’s why we decided this would be a useful webinar because we see, a lot of times you’re investing in your tools.

And then, sometimes it’s really hard to keep them up and to know if they’re healthy or not. I’m, we’re not surprised about that at all. So I will go on to my next step.

Don Helliwell:

Let’s continue with that just for a second, Jean. Sure. One of the points of this, obviously we can sell you the business of providing a health check, but what are your own organizations. Your company has invested probably a lot of money in whatever tool they are using. So we can help you improve the performance of that tool so that you’re getting a good healthy tool. We’re working with. Various clients on that right now. You want that tool to be as healthy and functional as possible and as efficient as possible.

Changing from one tool to another tool, just because it’s not doing what you’re hoping it would do, or, maybe you just are real, not really knowledgeable on how to use it. That is such an expensive changeover to go from one tool to another. Yeah, that’s, I would always recommend trying to fix what you’ve got rather than to just bail on that tool and go to something else and spend a whole other pile of money.

Jean Agnew:

Yep. I would agree with you, Don. Thanks for bringing that point up. So I’d like to encourage everyone if you to contact us if you’re concerned about the health of your SAM solution. Our health checks usually take about four weeks. Thank you for attending today’s webinar. And now I’m going to go ahead and hand it over, back to Braden.

Moderator:

Great. Thank you Jean. Thanks to the rest of the team. We really appreciate you taking the time and for sharing this with us. Just a quick reminder to everyone that we will send the recording out tomorrow. If you have any further questions, please reach out to us. You can email us at info@anglepoint.com or you can go to our website with just www.anglepoint.com.

And then you can find any of us, Jean or Don, Diane, Andrei, Amber, we’ll they’re on LinkedIn and we encourage you to connect with us. But yeah, thanks for attending and we hope you have a great rest of your day. Thank you.

Great. Thanks. Bye.