How to exclude Software Installations and/or Discovery Models from Reconciliation

[dimitrisala]

Hi,

I currently have a particular product for which we have commercial editions and free Community editions installed. The discovery models for each of the installs are associated with the same Software model / Product which includes all editions. Is there a way to exclude installations with a particular 'Edition' from being counted in the software reconciliation. 

I have already troubleshooted/tried the following;

- Add a software install condition on the software model (Software Installation>DiscoveryModel>Edition IS NOT "Community"), however this then seems to then seems to also exclude the valid installs. It looks like the Install condition can only be an inclusive condition.

- Update the Discovery Map / Software Model to only match where Edition = empty (all the other editions installed have an empty edition populated so this picks up all the other valid installs). This works in terms of excluding the Community versions from being calculated against the particular software model, however on reconciliation the Community versions still appear as unlicensed installs on the Parent product i.e this just stops them from being counted against the specific entitlement/software model but still includes them as unlicensed installs for the Product.

My thoughts are to create a Software Model for the Community Edition and a generic 'unlimited' entitlement as a workaround, however this seems unnecessary and keen to understand if there is a better way to exclude these installation records.

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After further investigation the issue appears to be that the normalization is normalizing the Discovered Product "IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition" to the licensable Normalized Product "IntelliJ IDEA" rather than the correct Normalized Product "IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition". Therefore, I can revert the normalization and manually normalize this to be correct, however there are many different "Community" Edition discovery models so it will be quite tedious to update all of these and any time a new version is installed the new Discovery models will continue to normalize to the incorrect Product and need to continuously be reverted and manually normalized. 

Is there a way to resolve this with a workaround that does not involve having to manually normalize every discovery model while a request is raised with SNOW to update the content service to correctly normalize the "Community" Edition to the correct "Community" Edition product rather than the Licensable product?

[dreinhardt · Accepted solution]

Hi @dimitrisala,

with the W.DC release ServiceNow introduces a new feature to cover your use case, as the default product type is tied to the product and does not take of the edition, until now.

The Feature is called "Product License Exception Rules" - Content updates for Software Asset Management (servicenow.com)

Product types can be updated on a product’s edition level using the Custom Product License Exception Rules [samp_cust_prod_lic_excep_rules] table. For cases where certain editions are non-licensable, the product type gets updated automatically if the exception rule is defined in the Product License Exception Rules [samp_prod_lic_excep_rules] table or the Custom Product License Exception Rules [samp_cust_prod_lic_excep_rules] table. However, if a product is non-licensable, an exception rule can’t be created for ​a licensable edition. For this case, you must raise a case with the Content Service team​ with supporting documentation and the team reviews ​whether the edition must be tagged as licensable.

Best, Dennis

[dimitrisala]

Thanks Dennis, we are currently on Vancouver, upgrading to Xanadu shortly, so will utlise this feature once upgraded. Funnily enough the products in question I was having the challenges with were JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA and Pycharm which are in your screenshot. It's interesting that although there are 'Product' records in the content library for the non-licensable editions (e.g Product = IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition), normalization still associates the discovery models to the licensable Product.

[dreinhardt]

Hi @dimitrisala, as soon the exclusion rule is active, the product type will changed based on the excepmtion rule

[mikereaves77541]

I have a similar challenge, however potentially more common. 
How do we SAMP Admins exclude "trial" versions of software from reconciliation.
My org allows installation of trial versions of software by anyone.
Often the trials are for products the org has legitimate licenses for.
EXAMPLE:
computer_a : photoshop 11 : trial
computer_b : photoshop 10 : licensed
computer_c : photoshop 11 : licensed

the org has an entitlement for 2 rights


any advice would be appreciated