Duplicate Software Installation Records Due to Software Upgrades in SAM Pro Module

[Dhanaraju3]

Software installation table has duplicates record with same installed on name, display name, source but with different versions. For e.g. SCCM they have duplicates records but different versions. They are having the lower and latest version both. When we checked with SCCM they confirmed that the duplicates are there end source only. They are keeping the data in this way only that is why ServiceNow fetching the duplicates. But this is creating discrepancy on license workbench as we have two records for same software but different version and both are active.

Deleting the registry keys from the computers of old software versions, I feel is going to be very time-consuming process and waste of effort once the software updates again and another version is added to the registry.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Allen Andreas]

Duplicate post with two separate forum accounts? ...

https://www.servicenow.com/community/sam-forum/duplicate-software-installation-records-due-to-softwa... 

Please don't spam the forums.

[dreinhardt]

Hi @Dhanaraju3,

by default the SG-SCCM integration includes a step called "SG-SCCM Removed Software". This step takes care about the removal of outdated software installation records in ServiceNow. As you already said and also identified as the root cause is the following:

"When we checked with SCCM they confirmed that the duplicates are there end source only. They are keeping the data in this way only that is why ServiceNow fetching the duplicates.

As long the source system delivers outdated records of already installed software the SG-SCCM is not able to remove the outdated versions and will keep both as imported from the source.

The reasons why the SCCM team does this are unfortunately not known to us, but from all my projects where we have used SCCM as a source, no customer has kept the old versions in SCCM. As far as I know, SCCM actually deletes removed software from the database to avoid exactly this situation. Without the help of the SCCM team and a correct configuration, your problem is unfortunately very difficult to solve and requires extensive customizing, as these functions are actually all available in the standard system.

Best, Dennis

[MercBuilding]

Hi @Dhanaraju3 ,

    Are you using Servicenow Discovery as well along with SCCM? If so OOB we have scheduled job which identifies the duplicate software installation and mark one installation as active true and other as false, but this happens only when the discovery source is different for both the installations. If the  discovery source is SCCM and there are duplicate installations then this job wont mark the installation as inactive. The only problem i see here is on the workbench it will show too many installations count, but if you have enough rights even though there are n number of installations it will consume only one license (to confirm this you can check the metric attributes on Software model where attribute value is unlimited for the given metric).

If you want to avoid this scenario, you need to write a custom script include getting all the installations, group by product, version and if the count is more than 1 then keep the latest installation and mark other installations as active false. Now call this script include in a scheduled job and run it weekly once or twice based on how often you run reconciliation and do audits.

Please consider marking my reply as Helpful and/or Accept Solution, if applicable. Thanks!

[Shekhar Navhak1]

Did you get a solution for this, I am facing the same issue.