Last Scanned Date on Software Discovery

[jimnicholson]

Hello Community,

Hoping you can help me out here.   The "Last Scanned Date" field in our software installations inventory (Software Asset --> Software Installations) is not populating for items found during discovery.   I wanted to leverage this field to determine when installed software should be "removed" from a machine in ServiceNow.   Ideally, if we found software that should not be installed on a machine, we would notify the owner, they would remove it, I could leverage the "last scanned date" on the installation and remove it from ServiceNow after x amount of days.

Any idea how I can get discovery to populate this field?

We are using discovery for our server environment only, we use another product for our workstation discovery and we have this field populating for that feed.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Jim

[rraman_999]

Jim,

have you figured out what is causing this issue? We are on Fuji and having the same problem. Majority of the software installations records have this field set to null.

thanks

Ram

[jimnicholson]

Hi Ram,

Sadly, I have not, but I am going to raise a ticket with ServiceNow support, hopefully they'll be able to point me in the right direction.   If I get an answer back that helps me resolve it, I'll definitely post if up here for you.

[jimnicholson]

Hello again,

Just updating you on this, it looks like this is a known issue and they plan to update it in a future patch.   See below for comments provided by support on my incident:

With regards to this "last_scanned" date/field not updating via Discovery, there

is actually a known Problem being addressed for this issue.The Problem ticket for this is PRB667447 and I have linked this

Problem to this Incident for reference.

Looking at the notes in this Problem, it seems a fix for this is

being targeted in our Geneva Patch 8 and Helsinki Patch 2 releases.So, at this time, what I will do is I will move this ticket into a

"Pending Problem" state, this way once a version containing this fix is

available for you to upgrade to, we will let you know.

Meanwhile, with regards to any potential workarounds, it seems that

the code that is supposed to be updating this "last_scanned" field is being done

in out backend java code, so I don't believe there is much on the front end that

can be done for this at this time.You could possibly look into adding some type of Business Rule to

update this field if/when this record is being updated by Discovery to just pull

in the current Date/Time value (using GlideSystem functions like mentioned in

this Wiki article below)- http://wiki.servicenow.com/?title=GlideSystem_Date_and_Time_Functions

However, I would suggest waiting for the fix from this Problem to

address this issue.

[rraman_999]

Perfect. Thanks for following up Jim.