Software License Renewal Tracking w/o ITOM

[Priyanka Gupta]

I have a requirement to track all of the software assets of my organisation in ServiceNow. Right now, all of the software tracking happens on Excel sheets and obviously, it is a painful task for the System Admins to revisit Excel sheets, every now and then, to find out the licenses nearing renewal dates. They need to have early reminders and overdue notifications put in place to know which software licenses are expiring so that they can renew/ terminate the licensing contracts on time.

We do not have ITOM in place yet but we may some time in future.

We also do not use CMDB much for tracking anything.

My question - Do I put all of the software assets in CMDB or do I create a custom table for this?

If you suggest I go ahead and put everything in CMDB right now, what do you think the rework would be like when we implement ITOM?

Thank you for your help!

Priyanka

[Priyanka Gupta]

Hi @klf1123,

Thank you for your reply!

If I understand this correctly, you mean to say I do not add any software assets to my CMDB using Asset Management. Instead, I should be putting all of the Contract related information in Contract -> Software Licenses. This table is different from CMDB so there is no rework involved if I were to have Discovery at some point in time.

Is my understanding correct? Please comment.

Thank you!

Priyanka 

[klf1123]

That is correct. When you turn discovery on the software installs will show up in the related list in the bottom of the CIs (in the CMDB) but you can then use the Software Counters to do the comparison of the license and the discovery installs based on the software model that is selected for each. 

[Priyanka Gupta]

What is the difference between the following license types- Enterprise, SaaS and Subscription?

Priyanka

[Priyanka Gupta]

Also, our requirements is to add software licenses, renewal dates, reminder emails for the renewal, count of the licenses to be tracked, assignment group field for assigning the responsibility of contract renewal to a team. Some of these features are not available in Contract Management.

Please advise.

Priyanka

[klf1123]

Under the existing SAM plug-in all those requirements are available. https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/istanbul-it-service-management/page/product/asset-management/concept/c_ManageSoftwareLicenses.html