SAM Office Hours April 2025 – live verbal questions and answers

[Brad26]

Hello! Thanks to all who attended April’s SAM office hour session, we had over 200 attendees!

Below is a summary of the live verbal questions discussed during the call, along with written answers.  Feel free to ask more questions here in this community forum!

Finally, don’t forget to sign up for the next SAM office hour in May.

Best, - the NOW ITAM team

*****

Question: What is the best practice for documenting site-based licensing? [creating entitlements in ServiceNow SAM]

• Answer: The best practice for documenting site-based licensing involves configuring a custom metric for the license entitlement. Depending on the software deployments, leverage the install conditions on the software model to accommodate site-based licensing.

Question: What is the best practice around whether we should allow import of active user accounts or guest accounts during software subscription import?

• Answer: Start by setting up the integration for the SaaS vendor and getting the information into the tool. Ensure inactive user accounts are removed on the SaaS app side. You can kick off a reclamation within ServiceNow if the API is public-facing.

Question: Which is better, agent-based discovery or agentless discovery?

• Answer: Both have unique advantages. Agentless discovery avoids the need for installing another agent on a device, which can be beneficial for security reasons. Agent-based discovery increases reliability by consistently phoning home to the ServiceNow instance.

Question: What is the best way to implement SaaS such as Adobe Acrobat Pro in the environment and getting the counters?

• Answer: Set up the integration profile first to create the software model, then attach entitlements to the created software model. This ensures proper connection and compliance.

Question: Is there any plan to put the contract management or procurement views into the software asset management workspace?

• Answer: Under safe harbor, there are plans to evaluate and review the inclusion of SAM contract management into the workspace. Currently, the renewals calendar is available in the workspace.

Question: What does active install true/false mean? What makes an install false?

• Answer: Active install true/false indicates whether the installation record is counted as part of the reconciliation. The deduplication process ensures only one installation record is set to true, while others are set to false.

Question: What is the fastest way to get real, hard cash return on investment for leadership?

• Answer: Implementing direct SaaS integrations can provide quicker time to value by identifying unused subscriptions and starting automated reclamation.

Question: What is the difference between per user and per named user license metrics?

• Answer: The difference may stem from the publisher's licensing model. Ensure the metric group, license metric, and license type on the software entitlement record aligns with the publisher's contract.