How to only reconcile software on Installed devices

[Mike88]

Hi
I've had a look on the forums and found a few posts but these do not align with what i'm attempting to achieve so wondered if anyone else had come across similar issues.

Across our desktop estate we have a number of devices in various states including, Installed, In Stock, In Maintenance etc. however, we are experiancing issues with the reconcliation and licence workbench as all the devices which are not "Installed" have no assigned owner and therefore show not compliant against various metric software licences (such as Per User / Per Named User)

While we could cycle the devices though a Retired state to remove the install records is there any way to limit reconciliation to just devices with an "Installed" or "In Use" device status.

The other articles i've found, including Explained: Software Asset Management System Proper... - ServiceNow Community all suggest adding a True/False attribute on the cmdb_ci_hardware table however, this would lead to a significant amount of extra manual work to update this when changing an asset's state which i'd prefer to avoid.

I feel like i can't be the first, nor will I be the last person who has this issue.
 

[dreinhardt · Accepted solution]

Hi @Mike88 ,

this is the best option to use the OOTB feature „exclude from SAM“. 

You could provide a scheduled job/script to update the true/false daily or implement a business rule to update the value on each insert/update.

on top you’ve to execute the SAM scheduled job to include/exclude the sw install relationships based on your „exclude from SAM“ plugin.

all of these tasks needs to be performed before the reconciliation.

Best. Dennis 

[dreinhardt · Accepted solution]

Hi @Mike88 ,

this is the best option to use the OOTB feature „exclude from SAM“. 

You could provide a scheduled job/script to update the true/false daily or implement a business rule to update the value on each insert/update.

on top you’ve to execute the SAM scheduled job to include/exclude the sw install relationships based on your „exclude from SAM“ plugin.

all of these tasks needs to be performed before the reconciliation.

Best. Dennis 

[mikew_samexpert · Accepted solution]

My recommendation is to create a software install condition on the impacted software models so that only devices with an Asset.In Use or Computer.Installed status are counted during software license compliance calculations.

It is also worth noting that with the "Per Named User" license metric, the best practice is to allocate such licenses to the assigned user on the software entitlement record. Visual Studio is a good example of this use case.

[dreinhardt]

Hi @mikew_samexpert ,

please keep in mind that this will result in a clean model result, but all other installs will be captured as „not licensed“ or „install req. action“ in another model.

Best, Denni

[mikew_samexpert]

Would they not be just "ignored installs"? If not, then the creation of a 'dummy' sw model with LUM set to false and a condition of ignoring asset states of not "In Use" would address this.