Software Asset Management FAQ Guide

Kieron Dean · ‎08-30-2024

Welcome to our comprehensive Frequently Asked Questions guide for Software Asset Management

Q: What is Software Asset Management?

A: Software Asset Management (SAM) is a business practice that involves managing and optimizing the purchase, deployment, maintenance, utilization, and disposal of software applications within an organization. Managing software assets is important because most employees in an enterprise have a computer and use company-provided software—whether on-premises or cloud-based. Improper software asset management (SAM) can lead to hefty fines during a vendor audit, wasted spend for unused, underutilized, or unsanctioned software, and can create security risks.

ServiceNow® Software Asset Management is the tool needed to help IT better oversee and control software assets from a physical, financial, and contractual perspective through their lifecycle.

In addition to managing software assets from the distribution and usage of software, ServiceNow® Software Asset Management facilitates lifecycle processes—as well as policy and governance monitoring and enforcement.

Q: How do I activate ServiceNow® Software Asset Management?

A: Activation Process:

Contact Account Manager: To purchase Software Asset Management, reach out to your ServiceNow account manager.
Submit Activation Request: If you lack an account manager or wish to evaluate the product, submit a request via the Now Support Service Portal.

Important Notes:

Only ServiceNow personnel can activate the plugin, which won't appear in the plugin list post-activation.
After installation or upgrade, revert customizations using the ‘Revert Customizations’ module for proper functionality.

Activation Steps:

Navigate to All Applications and select Request Plugin.
Access the Now Support Service Portal.
Choose your instance and select Actions > Activate Plugin.
Fill out the Activate Plugin form and submit.

For additional details about requesting a plugin, see Requesting a Plugin from the Service Catalog [KB0751715] article in the Now Support Knowledge Base.

Q: What are the capabilities in the latest release?

A: Check out our article: What's New in Washington D.C. Release for Software Asset Management

Q: Are release notes available?

A: Yes, they're located within our product documentation, the below link will take you to the latest version of the release notes.

Software Asset Management release notes

Q: What is the Software Asset Workspace?

A: The Software Asset Workspace is a unified medium with multiple views. The views let you create entitlements, software models, run and review reconciliation results, remediate noncompliance, give visibility into your software assets, and provides access to analytics via dashboards.

The Software Asset Workspace contains the following views:

Software asset overview: The landing page of the Software Asset Workspace. You can create entitlements, run reconciliation, view key metrics and get time sensitive alerts and notifications regarding your software assets.
License usage: You can view the compliance status of all your publishers, review reconciliation results, reclaim unused software, and view and run reports.
License operations: Lists all the entitlements, software models, import entitlement errors, discovery models.
Software asset analytics: View consolidated dashboards for SaaS, discovered inventory, optimization, lifecycle management, cloud cost simulator, Engineering License, and normalization and content.
Success portal view in Software Asset Workspace: Assess the performance of the Software Asset Management application in your environment.
Renewals calendar: View the entitlements nearing their expiry date and contracts nearing their expiry date or are already expired.
Overlapping usage: View the feature level usage of your SaaS and SSO applications.
Content lookup: View the data stored in the Software Asset Management Content Service.

Note: Beginning with the Now Platform Xanadu release, limited support is provided for the Software Asset Management classic user interface. While it remains active in your instance, including when you upgrade to a new Now Platform release, you're encouraged to move to the new workspace experience.

Q: What Discovery Sources can I use to populate the CMDB for SAM?

A: There are many possible sources of data across on-premises and cloud estates that may be leveraged to populate the ServiceNow CMDB and Software Asset management tables. Below are common examples. For 3^rd party discovery sources, we recommend using ‘Service Graph Connectors’ where available to ensure data consistency.

ServiceNow Discovery (Agentless & ACC-V)
Endpoint Management
- SCCM/MECM
- Intune
- Tanium
- Jamf
Publisher specific
- SAP ABAP
- IBM ILMT
SaaS
- Direct integrations (see below)
- Single Sign-On (SSO) integrations

Q: What SaaS Integrations are available?

A:

Adobe Workfront
Aha!
Asana
Box
Calendly
Cisco Webex
Confluence Cloud
CrowdStrike
DocuSign
Dropbox
Google Workspace
GitHub
GoTo
Jira Software
Looker
Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Apps
Miro
monday.com
PagerDuty
Rally
Roadmunk
Salesforce CRM
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Slack
SmartRecruiters
Smartsheet
SAP SuccessFactors
SurveyMonkey
Tableau Cloud
Trello
Workday
Workplace from Facebook
Zendesk
Zoom

Q: What are Reclamation Rules?

A: Reclamation rules aggregate usage over time and specify a minimum number of hours or the latest date that a software unit must be used before the software is flagged for reclamation. Reclamation rules can be created for Installed Software, Subscription Software, Engineering App License & SAP Named User.

You can optimize your environment by reclaiming unused software as well as removing unauthorized software.

If a user is not using software installed, or infrequently, that software can be a candidate for removal. Removal means uninstalling and reallocating the software to an individual who will use it more often. Removal candidates are used to reclaim software installations.

Q: How do I bulk upload Software Entitlement data?

A: Procedure

Navigate to All > Software asset > Software Asset Workspace.
Select Create entitlement.
In the Create new entitlement dialog box, select Import multiple entitlements from an Excel file and select Next.
In the Create New Entitlement Import page, select Download template to download a spreadsheet template (.xlsx).

You can add software entitlement fields to the template to include additional fields in your import. Add each field as a new column in the template. The column name must match the field label exactly. Besides the Publisher, Product, Version, Edition, Platform and Language, the Install condition name column is also taken into account to find the correct software model while importing entitlements.

You can include base system software entitlement fields as well as your custom software entitlement fields. Custom choice columns (where the type is Choice) created in the Asset [alm_asset] or Software Entitlement [alm_license] table are also supported.

Note: By default, the Unit cost column in the spreadsheet takes into account the currency that your system is set to. However, you can manually change the currency and the Software Asset Management application will honor the currency that you specify. To specify a currency, enter the currency code followed by a semicolon and the cost. For example, EUR;200. Valid currency codes are the ones listed in the Currency [fix_currency] table and have the Active column set to true.

Enter the entitlement details in the template and select Attach File to upload the spreadsheet.

Once the file is uploaded, the name of the file appears and the Description field is automatically populated. You can change the description to make it more specific.

Select Import.

An import record is created that retains the history of the upload for you to view later.

A confirmation message appears informing you that the import of entitlements is in progress. Once the import record is processed, the Status field displays one of the following values: Completed, Completed with errors, or Failed.

Select the link in the confirmation message to check the status of the record.

The License operations view appears displaying the entitlement record in the Entitlement Import page

Open the entitlement record to view its details.
Click the Entitlements tab to view the list of entitlements that got successfully created.

Note: The Entitlements tab only appears if the Status field displays the values, Completed, or Completed with errors.

If any errors occur and the status says Completed with errors, click Review import errors.

The Review entitlement import errors page opens containing two tabs:

Import errors: displays records whose error status is Needs review.
Relate entitlements: lists entitlements, such as maintenance entitlements, that are in the build state and can be linked to the base entitlements.

Select the import error record to view the errors.

For a detailed description of the entitlement import error fields, see Entitlement import error fields

Correct the errors and select Import.

The entitlement is successfully created. Further processing of the entitlement continues such as validation of downgrade models for the entitlement. For more information on resolving errors, see Entitlement import error actions.

Q: Do you support Bring-Your-Own-Licenses (BYOL) & Bring-Your-Own-Subscription (BYOS)?

A: Yes. Software Asset Management currently provides the following support with respect to BYOL/BYOS:

Microsoft Windows Server and SQL Server across Hybrid Environment (AWS, Azure & Google Compute Cloud)
Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic Server across Hybrid Environment (AWS, Azure & Google Compute Cloud)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server

Q: What is the SAM Content Service?

A: The Software Asset Management Content Service is an IT Asset Management (ITAM) shared service that provides users with continual software recognition improvements. By sharing unnormalized software installation data with ServiceNow, you receive automatic content updates based on your unique software installation footprint.

Data shared using the Software Asset Management Content Service remains anonymous and secure, following ServiceNow privacy policies, and is properly disposed of after review.

This new content improves your normalization hit ratios, which enable you to manage your software assets better.

The Software Asset Management Content Service provides content updates to your instance weekly that you can use to normalize your data.

Q: What Publisher-specific capabilities do you have?

A: Software Asset Management publisher packs cover the largest vendors your organization uses with advanced patterns for Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Adobe, SAP, VMware, and Citrix. Publisher packs include license workspace views and reports to show vendor compliance, calculations to determine which license models to use, and insights into potential savings and optimization opportunities.

Q: Is Software Asset Management Oracle Verified?

A: Yes. With the verification and enrollment of ServiceNow in the Oracle Third-Party Tool Vendor Program, the ServiceNow Discovery application and Software Asset Management application have been verified to provide accurate software usage data for the following products:

Oracle Database and Database Options
Oracle Fusion Middleware

Q: Can Software Asset Management be used to track and manage IBM licensing?

Yes. The IASP Program is an alternative to traditional software license verification audits. Under the Program terms, clients who contract with an IBM Authorized SAM Provider are permitted to independently report their use of IBM software and will be exempt from audits for as long as they are an active participant in the IASP Program.

You can track and manage IBM licenses in both VMware vSphere environments and IBM LPAR infrastructures by integrating the Software Asset Management publisher pack for IBM with Software Asset Management providers that are authorized to participate in the IBM Authorized SAM Provider (IASP) Program. With these integrations, you can track and manage IBM licensing directly without having to integrate with the IBM License Metric Tool (ILMT) or BigFix Inventory.

The IBM publisher pack supports integrations with the following authorized Software Asset Management providers:

Anglepoint (through the Anglepoint Elevate platform)
Deloitte