Discovery Software population and Adobe Acrobat edition

[Community Alums]

I always thought I understood how Software was being populated by Discovery, but now I’m trying to look closer to troubleshoot the lack of  ‘edition’ information with Adobe Acrobat, I’m left puzzled as to how software is populated into [cmdb_sam_sw_install].

When i run a Discovery against a laptop i can see that it Classifies the laptop as a 'Windows Desktop' and so triggers the ‘Windows’ classifier. This in turn runs the

• 'Windows OS - Desktop' Horizontal Pattern,
• 'MultiProbe-Windows - ADM' Probe
• ‘WMIRunner-Windows - Installed Software' Probe

I was a little surprised to see that Installed Software is still triggered by a probe, even though there is a ‘Windows - Installed Software’ pattern – but the pattern doesn’t appear to be referenced anywhere.

I have rerun the Probe to Pattern migration and nothing has changed – so can only assume the probe is correct.

Reading through the Probe script I can see that an extra value is retrieved to determine the ‘edition’, but looking at the sensor script it only appears to populate [cmdb_ci_spkg] table - I can’t see any reference to the edition or  anywhere or where the software is populated into [cmdb_sam_sw_install]. Where is this defined / managed please?

Secondly as the edition value is being retrieved, how and where is the ‘edition’ value against the ‘Adobe Acrobat’ payload converted into the Pro / Standard values we expect to see?  I would expect this OOTB with Discovery, but the only mention I can see in the forums is related to SCCM

I'm running latest patters - 1.15.0 on Washington, with Software Asset Management plugin

Many Thanks

[palanikumar]

Hi,

cmdb_sam_sw_install is part of Software Asset Management (SAM). It keeps the normalized name of the discovered software.

You can refer the below URL for details

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/washingtondc-it-asset-management/page/product/software-asset-mana... 

[Community Alums]

Thanks Palani,

What i'm looking for is a bit more detail on:

1. Should we be using Probes or the Pattern for Software Discovery - The pattern looks like its not maintained; is not used anywhere i can see; and does not mention Acrobat, so assume is not as up to date as the probe.

2. How is the data written from the Probe to the cmdb_sam_sw_install table - Ive made some progress to understand this (see Redirect from cmdb_ci_spkg and cmdb_software_instance to cmdb_sam_sw_install) but 'GlideappCMDBSoftwareHelper' seems to be blackboxed, so i can't confirm the logic its using to process the Adobe 'edition' value mentioned above

Thanks

David

[peterikeda1]

The add/remove programs registry doesn't contain a separate 'edition' field. When ServiceNow runs a discovery scan against a Windows device it collects data from the DisplayName, DisplayVersion and Publisher fields and then the content normalization process will try to infer what the edition is based on those values. If a software package doesn't explicitly include the edition as part of the DisplayName string then usually it's not possible to determine what it is.

As far as differentiating Adobe Acrobat Pro from Reader, I don't think you can if you're only relying on what's in add/remove programs since the same installer package is used for both. This is Adobe's recommendation on how to tell the difference between the two:

https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/about-acrobat-reader-dc-migration-to-64-bit.html

The expected output from that key matches up with your SCCM screenshot so my guess is this is how they're pulling in the edition info.