When you run reconciliation, SAM Pro shows the software installs which are unlicensed, requiring action and ones that have been ignored from licensing. This provides indepth details to the SAM Managers to understand their installs for a specific product and their issues.
The blog focuses on explaining the unlicensed installs, installs requiring action and the ignored installs metric on the License usage view (License work bench).
Explanation of these metrics
- Installs requiring action: Indicates an action that you need to perform to fix an issue for an installation, such as problems with CIs, entitlement, or software model setup
- Unlicensed installs: refers to installations for which you have purchased some entitlements, but the rights owned are not sufficient to cover all the entities that require rights
- Ignored installs: installations ignored from the reconciliation process.
More details here
Some common reasons on software Installs- where Install requiring action is shown
|
S.No. |
Reason |
Details |
|
1 |
Install missing CPU Count |
Discovery sources unable to determine the CPU count for licensable software without which license compliance determination cannot be done |
|
2 |
Install missing CPU Core Count |
Discovery sources unable to determine the CPU core count for licensable software deployed on virtual machines without which license compliance determination cannot be done |
|
3 |
Install is not fully normalized |
Software Installed on this device is not fully normalized. To get accurate license compliance results, normalization is essential. As a result, ServiceNow SAM Pro does not consider this installation for license consumption. Please perform manual normalization, or enable content services to complete normalization, in order to get accurate results for license compliance. For an accurate license compliance position, it is expected to have more than 90% normalization rates. To validate results, run reconciliation again. |
|
4 |
No applicable software entitlement |
This software installation cannot be licensed due to one of the following reasons: 1. The software installation lacks a corresponding software model and/or entitlement. 2. The software installation fails to meet the software or product install conditions of an existing entitlement. 3. The software installation is associated with an entitlement that is missing the required Software Assurance (SA) benefits. To license this software installation, create a corresponding entitlement with the correct publisher part number (PPN) so that the Software Asset Management application can automatically generate an appropriate software model for the installation. Ensure that all applicable software install conditions, product install conditions, and SA benefits are configured. After you create the entitlement, run reconciliation again to verify that the software installation was licensed successfully. |
|
5 |
Max number of sockets exceeded (Oracle) |
As per Oracle licensing policy, Oracle Database Standard Edition 2 can only be licensed on servers with a maximum of two sockets. Number of sockets available on this server is more than the permissible limit. You are advised to uninstall the Oracle Database Standard Edition 2 from this server. Before performing this action, please work with your Oracle Database Administrator to assess the impact. ServiceNow SAM Pro automatically generates reclamation candidate to guide you through the process. To validate results, run reconciliation again. |
|
6 |
Install with missing SaaS Subscription |
A software installation is identified on this device for which the assigned user has no subscription. Therefore, ServiceNow SAM Pro does not consider this installation for license consumption. This may occur due to an issue with the subscription integration or an issue on the external subscription portal. Please check with the external subscription portal administrator to see if a user has been assigned to the subscription. If so then rerun the integration and revalidate the results. To validate results, run reconciliation again. |
|
7 |
Install with missing assigned to user |
The device has a software installation but there is no user assigned to the device. Therefore, for subscription products it is difficult to assign the installation to a user subscription license. As a result, ServiceNow SAM Pro doesn't consider this installation for license consumption. This problem can arise due to many reasons such as user subscription information is not downloaded completely due to an issue with the integration or missing tenant information; please check if the user has a subscription and take corrective steps to rerun the integration and check details. Additionally, if the user doesn't have a valid subscription, you can either purchase a subscription for the user or uninstall the software from the user's device. To validate results, run reconciliation again. |
|
8 |
Install missing relationships for on premise VMs |
Ensure that the correct relationships are discovered between servers and the virtual machine this installation is deployed on. The relationships discovered are different for different virtualization technologies, owing to their different architectures. For example for VMware the relationships discovered as as follows: Cluster-> Members -> Hypervisor (VMware ESX)-> virtualizes-> Server VMs -> Instantiated by-> VM Instance (You can see this on the CMDB Dependency View). Once discovered, you can use SAM Virtualization Adapter (only available from San Diego) to reconcile software installed on the different virtualization technologies in a standardized manner. |
|
9 |
Missing VMware Vcenter version |
For certain software such as Oracle, the version of VMware Center virtualization drives different licensing rules. For accurate license compliance calculations, it is critical to determine the Vcenter version. Please work with the discovery team to discover the VMware vCenter versions effectively.
|
|
10 |
Missing cloud license type |
To accurately determine license compliance, ServiceNow SAM Pro needs to know the cloud license type, License Included or BYOL, being used. As the cloud license type is not identified, ServiceNow SAM Pro is unable to apply license compliance rules. Please work with the discovery team to identify the cloud license type. |
In some cases, SAM Pro is not able to determine the exact reason why it is not able to reconcile the install. In these cases, it shows an undetermined reason. To understand this in more details refer here.
Some common reasons on software Installs- where Install are ignored from licensing:
|
S.No. |
Reason |
Details |
|
1 |
Installs ignored through LUM |
The software installation is excluded from license consumption. This is because the software model with License under management is marked as false. Please verify that the software model is correctly configured with License under management set to false, in accordance with your organization's requirements. In most cases, License under management is set to false which prevents software installations on development, test, and failover environments from using licenses. |
|
|
Invalid install of MS SQL Server |
This record for Microsoft SQL Server software installation is generated through registry-based ServiceNow discovery. It is created when only SQL Server component services are installed and running on the machine. Since a full Microsoft SQL Server software installation is not present, this entry is excluded from software license compliance calculations." |
|
|
License included install on cloud |
The software installed on the device is not taken into account when calculating license consumption. This is due to the fact that thw software licenses on these virtual machines are managed by specific cloud providers. However, If bring your own license (BYOL) applies to these virtual machines then ServiceNow SAM Pro would use licenses on those machines. |
|
|
Empty IBM ILMT usage information |
Through the integration with IBM License metric tool (IBM ILMT), ServiceNow SAM Pro is not retreiving the details of the product. Therefore , ServiceNow SAM Pro will ignore this product from reconciliation process |
|
|
Passive role for SQL Server HADR Environment |
This SQL Server instance is a passive failover replica in an Always On availability group and doesn't require a license. With active Software Assurance or subscription licenses, customers can use one passive replica for high availability, one for disaster recovery in a separate OSE, and one for disaster recovery in a single Azure VM or instance |
