SAM Office Hours Q&A December 2025 | EMEA/APAC Session

[Kieron Dean]

About This Document

This document contains 24 questions and answers from the SAM Office Hours session held on December 2, 2025. SAM Office Hours is a monthly live Q&A session where ServiceNow customers can ask questions about Software Asset Management directly to product experts.

Of the 24 questions, 20 were answered in writing during the session via the Zoom Q&A panel. An additional 4 answers were extracted from the session recording transcript.

Note: Answers marked as "Extracted from Recording" were processed using AI transcription and extraction. While we have made every effort to ensure accuracy, these answers may contain inaccuracies or miss nuances from the original spoken response.

Answer Source Legend

Written (Q&A Panel) — Answer typed directly in the Zoom Q&A during the session

Extracted from Recording — Answer spoken verbally, extracted from transcript (AI-processed)

Questions & Answers

#	Question	Answer	Source
1	Hi, is there any doc on best practice about the recurrent health check to be perform on SAM Pro?	Documentation: https://www.servicenow.com/docs/csh?topicname=sam-health-check.html&version=latest	Written
2	No SN Discovery, only third-party sources. What is the go-to fastest ROI activity for SAM Pro.	Hi Nicholas, the low hanging fruit is more on the End User Computing (EUC) area in that case. Discovery is strongly recommended when it comes to Data Center licensing. For EUC I recommend using Service Graph Connectors.	Written
3	With regards to the downgrade rights table 1. What does Active is ‘false’ mean? Implications to compliance/reconciliation 2. What action is required to resolve if Active is ‘false’?	Hi Sarah,  I believe you are referring to this table. The Active flag is maintained by the ServiceNow Content team. If a rule is valid, it will appear with Active = true; otherwise, it will show as false.  If you have any specific requests or need updates to the content, you can submit a Content Request using the link below: https://www.servicenow.com/docs/bundle/zurich-it-asset-management/page/product/software-asset-manage...	Written
4	Is there a best practice around frequency of running the reconcilliation?	Typically, stagger the publishers for recon. But depending on your publishers, start with the top ones.	Written
5	Is there a best practice around frequency of running the reconcilliation?	The recommended frequency depends on how often your inventory sources (SCCM, Intune, Discovery, etc.) are updated, as well as the configuration steps you need to run, such as normalization. Also, make sure to schedule the reconciliation during periods of low activity, as several tables will be refreshed during the process.	Written
6	Nick please - only Mum calls me Nicholas when I'm in trouble 😉	You are not in trouble 😉	Written
7	If we are over 70% SaaS is SAM pro still the ideal solution? How do we account for usage, especially if SSO doesnt capture everything?	Usage is typically retrieved via the direct integrations we have wit the SaaS vendors.	Written
8	Could there be a way to simplify the UI - i.e. step new users through a growth journey. I'm ok with it, but clients have commented on the UI being overwhelming on Day 1.	Hi Nicholas, We use a crawl–walk–run framework for SAM onboarding, which helps simplify the experience for new users. They begin with foundational activities, progress to operational workflows, and eventually adopt full SAM maturity at their own pace. If you have specific asks or areas you’d like us to focus on, please elaborate and we’ll be happy to address them	Written
9	Windows and SQL Server Infrastructure report shows only "inventoried/scanned" instances of WIndows Servers, which is misleading as it doesn't show the unscanned devices e.g. coming from Azure or virtualisation platforms. Is there a plan to upgrade the report to consider discovered Windows Servers, but unscanned? Also what's the best practise for SAM Manager to ensure / validate completeness of the data in SAM Pro? Healthcheck helps only partially.	You can configure credential-less Discovery, which indicates that a Windows Server was found within a certain IP range. It will show very basic details, but should be a trigger for the Discovery admin to configure the credentials accordingly. More info:  https://www.servicenow.com/docs/bundle/zurich-it-operations-management/page/product/discovery/refere...  Note that his is more a Discovery issue and therefor indeed not listed in SAM. It is recommended to implement CMDB processes to validate (lackning) data like this.	Written
10	Regarding adding the Software Entitlements for SAAS product such as Workday, ServiceNow, do we have to create one software entitlement for ServiceNow or do we have to create each entitlement for separate modules? For example: Workday has, Workday Financials, Strategic Solution...Do we have to create one entitlements as Workday or create one for financials module and separate one for Strategic Solution	It depends if a module equals one subscription odr a subscription covers multiple modules.  If there is a one to one alignment module to subscription, you will have to create an entitlement per module.	Written
11	Any tips for checking data quality of Kubernetes discovery from the SAM perspective? How are Kubernetes pods linked to SAM?	If it's Cloud based K8s we would need to have ITOM Discovery and also ITOM agents to discover the pods. Cloud cost management can also help if it's cost management in the cloud Finops.	Written
12	Do you have any personal best practices that you use when implementing/enabling Content Service to make sure no foundational gotchas are hit?	It's pretty straight forward if you decide to turn the Content service on, but you can also reach the content team through a support case for new content requests.	Written
13	Do you have any personal best practices that you use when implementing/enabling Content Service to make sure no foundational gotchas are hit?	You can also keep an eye on the “Normalization and content” tab under Software asset analytics page to see the level of normalisation and status.	Written
14	Hello, regarding software metering, is the ACC-V agent mandatory if we don't have any other 3rd party tool like SCCM?	Yes, in this case ACC-V is required in order to measure software usage data.	Written
15	Is SAM Pro fully certified by Oracle like Snow or Flexera?	So question from Vincent, which is Sam Pro fully certified by Oracle like Snow or Flexera? So Vincent, yes. So let's put a bit of colour on this question for those who may not be familiar. So Oracle as a vendor have a what they call a third party vendor verification program where they will verify certain technologies. So Sam tools to be approved as sources of information for Oracle products. They are four different verification areas, Oracle Database, Middleware, Java and E-business. And if you have this verification stamp from Oracle, then what it means is Oracle will accept the data about your Oracle deployments of those products areas in lieu of an audit. So what that means is they will accept that information when it comes to having conversations with you about your Oracle usage. One thing to just call out straight away, the verification programme is only around the consumption data. It's only around the discovery, if you like of what Oracle products you have running. It is not a verification of the compliance position that those tools will compute. So SAT, ServiceNow, Sam Pro, Flexera and others, take the data about your software consumption, your inventory, compare that to your entitlement and give you a compliance position for Oracle and other publishers with all samples do that. Oracle do not verify the compliance position. They verify the consumption data, the discovered data. So that's one thing to make perfectly clear at the start. But to answer the question, Vincent, yes, we are verified.	Extracted from transcript
16	Is SAM Pro fully certified by Oracle like Snow or Flexera?	https://www.oracle.com/au/corporate/license-management-services/tooling/	Written
17	Kenney Remmerswaal - true that server inventory is Discovery topic, however data quality is a key to SAM Pro and there's no mechanism out of the box for SAM Manager to tell if they can rely on the data and help / drive quality improvement from SAM side. It's turns out ot be a significant challenge, while solution is simple as 99% of the data is already in CMDB, but not presented in meaningful way (e.g. virtual machines data coming from Spokes)	However you have you consume the data, you have a lot of dependency on the data. So that's also why we always recommend to have good hardware verification processes to make sure that the data's accurate. So you need to validate the data from different sources. So look at Active Directory, look at the seem to be of course as your starting point, but then look at other sources like Active Directory. SSCM security tools often should contain all the assets, all the CIS. So make sure you have those processes in place to check the completeness of your data from time to time. So the other thing to look at is the sources. So I think a lot of customers that are a bit more mature are bringing in multiple sources. So go into detail. There's a lot of info about identifying what sources are bringing the data in and a lot of work probably initially to do which source do you actually trust the data. So a lot of times it could be overwritten or it becomes all data when one of the discovery channels are not functioning. So there's a couple of things to look at to get the data. Exactly useful. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. A lot of our customers are using, multiple sources of information. So you might have ServiceNow Discovery, you might have SCCM Tanium, and all three of those sources could be bringing in inventory on the same server, right. And that information goes into your CMDB. So there is a multi source element to this to consider as, as was just mentioned, of course, we do have functionality in our ire to deal with those. So you won't see duplicates. But one, sometimes it's worth going in and just making sure you've got the right rules in place around which data you trust the most or which data you want to prioritise when you have	Extracted from transcript
18	Kenney Remmerswaal - true that server inventory is Discovery topic, however data quality is a key to SAM Pro and there's no mechanism out of the box for SAM Manager to tell if they can rely on the data and help / drive quality improvement from SAM side. It's turns out ot be a significant challenge, while solution is simple as 99% of the data is already in CMDB, but not presented in meaningful way (e.g. virtual machines data coming from Spokes)	Thanks Kenney, bartosz we are also working on CMDB advisor for SAM that will help recommend with discoveru solution to use for a product, and then show you the imp KPI/issues and provide a way to remediate…let us know if you would want a design partnership with us on this we can show u initial design	Written
19	When creating/editing a Software Model do you have any personal tips to make sure that we dont end up overcomplicating the model which can make later management and some background automation challenging to sustain? i.e. do you suggest completing all fields or is there a sweet spot??	Hi Nick,  Ideally, you shouldn’t need to manually create software models — they are typically generated automatically during entitlement onboarding through PPNs. For SaaS integrations, software models are also created as part of the identifier normalization process.  However, if you do need to create software models manually, please refer to the guidance available in our documentation: 🔗 Create software models in the Software Asset Workspace (Zurich)	Written
20	When creating/editing a Software Model do you have any personal tips to make sure that we dont end up overcomplicating the model which can make later management and some background automation challenging to sustain? i.e. do you suggest completing all fields or is there a sweet spot??	Nicholas some more inputs: https://www.servicenow.com/community/sam-blog/review-software-models/ba-p/3304620	Written
21	Regarding SAM and Kubernetes, what is the recommended discovery method for Kubernetes: pattern, KVA, etc.?	ITOM Discovery is the preferred method for Kubernetes Discovery. You can also find some guidance in this community article https://www.servicenow.com/community/itom-articles/kubernetes-discovery-with-servicenow-complete-set....	Written
22	In the Health Check, will there be an option to acknowledge findings but no actions to be taken, or just to put them into buckets - those that we can address, those that we have already reviewed but we can't address / don't plan on addressing, etc.	Looks like a follow up on the health check. So in the health check, will there be an option to acknowledge findings but no actions to be taken or just put them into buckets, those that we can address, those that we have already reviewed but we can't address, don't plan on addressing, etcetera. And so one, I'll make an observation on this. I've heard similar comments on the health check. I think the health check is super useful. It gives you a lot of information on areas that you perhaps need to address in order to make sure that Sam is functioning healthily. On the flip side of that, it gives you a lot of information. And one of the pieces of feedback I get from a lot of customers is we , we have thousands of alerts from the health check and we just don't have the bandwidth or time to get to all of those or prioritise all of them. So I don't know Srinivasa, I don't want to put you on the spot if there's if you have a any ideas or anything that you might be able to. Yeah, I think, I think the concerns, the concerns are valid. First of all, we acknowledge that. But now just immediately, right. I don't know if this, but there is a mute finding. You could mute your findings. So if you, for example, if there's a health check and you do not want to take any action on it, you can mute it and then it will not generate. But yeah, but it doesn't have all these mechanisms as such that, you want to categorise those findings as something that you want to do later, something. Now, so that functionality, we can take that as a feedback. Please drop a feedback on an idea portal and we'll look into it. Perfect. Thank you, Shrinivas. And yeah, we mentioned the, we mentioned the ideas portal there. So if you're not familiar, we have an ideas portal where you can	Extracted from transcript
23	In the Health Check, will there be an option to acknowledge findings but no actions to be taken, or just to put them into buckets - those that we can address, those that we have already reviewed but we can't address / don't plan on addressing, etc.	Just to add — if corrective actions are taken, the items will get cleared in the next scan. However, as Srinivas acknowledged, we can continue to work on those additional asks.	Written
24	RE: my downgrade rights question. If the record is false, does that mean a new one may be available and needs to be added?	but your questions come in regarding downgrade rights. So RE my downgrade rights question, if the record is false, does that mean a new one may be available and needs to be added? So Sarah, I'm guessing this is a follow up to an original question. I can, I can, that's it. I think that was yours, right? Yeah, I can go with that, Karen. Yeah. So on this one, right that active false and are true is that depends upon how the content is shipping the rule. So once they get an understanding right that this is a particular downgrade, right, may not be valid. So they have an option to make it false. And if there is a new rule is available, they wouldn't ship those new rules. But if you have an specific ask, right, and if you believe that there are certain downgrades which you expect to be there and those are missing, you can always raise a content request. And I can leave, I've already left the link, but I can where how you can raise the content request. I can just leave another time on the chat window as well for everyone. And I hope it answers your question, Sarah. Brilliant. Thank you. Yeah, much appreciated. And Sarah, hopefully that answers the question. If not, feel free to feel free to come back in Q& A or or put your hand up and we can we can carry the conversation on. All right, So what I'm doing, I'm just going to review the questions that have come in so far and see if there's anything that we need to follow up on. Kieran, there was a couple in there which were just asking and I'm trying to scroll back myself about just different discovery tools, whether it's, third party like SCCM, Intune, JMF or Servicenow's agent client collector.	Extracted from transcript

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Additional Resources

🎬 SAM Ranger Videos — Step-by-step video tutorials from the SAM product team

📚 SAM Path to Value — Get to value with Software Asset Management

💡 ServiceNow Idea Portal — Submit feature requests and vote on ideas