Software Installations v Software Model v Reconciliation Results

[gml35]

Hi All,

Still trying to sort out some details around SAM.   I'm having issues sorting out the output I'm getting from SAM. I've submitted a incident to Hi but I figured I'd check here as well.   Hopefully this will help others trying to get off the ground with SAM:

Issue 1: When I look under Software Asset > Discovery > Software Installations I see a large number of software packages which represents the full catalog of software found by Discovery and SCCM.   When I go into Software Asset > Licensing > Software Models I only see 28 pieces of software

Q: Shouldn't the software model be created when the software is added to the Software installations module?

Issue 2: When I run reconciliation for all software I get 314 pieces of software that come back under Software Asset > Reconciliation result.   Again this is nowhere near the number of software that I actually have in my environment and more than the 28 in Software Asset > Licensing > Software Models.

Q: What is Reconciliation using to create the Reconciliation Results? Is it a different table from Software Asset > Discovery > Software Installation and Software Asset > Licensing > Software Models?

Thanks in advance!!!

[Community Alums]

Hi Glenn,

Here are some thoughts/clarifications for you:

1. Software Models are not created automatically. You still need to create Software Models for those Products you want to track compliance for. The content library facilitates this through the use of Products to match with existing titles and Discovery Maps to determine which Software Discovery Models match to it. Software Discovery Models are created when you discover software. One is created for each specific version of the software that exists in the environment. There are going to be fewer Discovery Models than Software Installations.

2 and 3. Reconciliation looks at Software Installations to determine how many rights are being used in the environment and it looks at Software Entitlements to determine how many rights are owned. This will not match the number of Software installations. You might have 3000 installations of Adobe Acrobat in your environment, but this is only one Product, so it will show as one line in the Reconciliation Results. In SAM Professional, you do not need to have Software Models to run Reconciliation, but without the Models, you will only see how many unlicensed installations you have for the software in your environment.

Ben

[gml35]

Hi Ben!

Thanks again for the detailed explanation.   I think my reconciliation may still be off.   When I group my Software Installations (Software Asset > Discovery > Software Installations) by publisher I get around 1200 publishers. Is there a trigger on the software record/publisher record that tells the system to reconcile for it?

Glenn

[Community Alums]

Hi Glenn,

You can't really base it on the raw Software Installation information, because those values could end up normalized. I cannot say for sure this is the cause without seeing it, but how many different versions of Microsoft do you have in your Software Installation grouping?

Instead, you need to approach this from the Software Discovery Models. How many Discovery Models do you have? And if you group by Publisher on the Discovery Models (this is the normalized value), how many do you get? Add one more filter to not show those with "Match not found." Do any of these numbers better align with your reconciliation numbers?

Ben

[German Bertot]

Another thing to look for is whether the products are licensable.   In a typical environment, discovery will report a lot of software products (installations) that need to be inventoried, but are not licensable (and therefore ignored by reconciliation).