Software Lifecycle

[Community Alums]

Recently we worked with a customer to implement SAM Pro.

Main purpose of implementing SAM Pro was to identify  Software past end of support or end of life date. While ServiceNow out of box lifecycle report table helps easily find out this detail but customer wanted to get metadata about these software installs.

Customer wanted to identify System Owner of the computers/servers where these software were installed and notify them to fix these Software Installs.

Unfortunately out of box ServiceNow does not map Lifecycle date to Software Install.

My common sense says that Lifecycle date should be mapped to  Discovered Model than Software Model because Lifecycle date is logically should be on  installed software (Discovery Model) not Entitlements (Software Model) but for some odd reason OOB ServiceNow map Lifecycle dates to Software Model in Lifecycle report. Due to this we had to customize and map Lifecycle Dates to Discovery Model table. 

In addition to this we found many more issues in Lifecycle report, which are completely different discussion. 

Is there any ServiceNow SAM Guru here who can tell us the reason why OOB Lifecycle details are mapped to Software Model than Discovery Model ? There must be a very good reason for this.

[dreinhardt]

Hi @Community Alums and thanks for your question!

it is correct that the lifecycle data is not linked directly to a software installation, but with the Tokyo release ServiceNow introduced a new feature - Software model relationship to software installation (servicenow.com). This adds a additional field to the discovery model form and will update it with the latest matching software model.

And on the basis of these links, it should be possible to provide all the necessary information on the lifecycle for each software model version without any problems and, if necessary, to control workflows. 

Q: Customer wanted to identify System Owner of the computers/servers where these software were installed and notify them to fix these Software Installs. Unfortunately out of box ServiceNow does not map Lifecycle date to Software Install.

A: Navigate to the Software Asset Management Workspace > Software Asset Overview > Widget "End of life products"

Q: Is there any ServiceNow SAM Guru here who can tell us the reason why OOB Lifecycle details are mapped to Software Model than Discovery Model ? There must be a very good reason for this.

A: I would assume that it is related to the CSDM data model, including the product "Technology Portfolio Management", which is part of the "Application Portfolio Management", which is completely based on software models at this point. - Technology Portfolio Management (servicenow.com) (well explained here)

At this point, however, it should be mentioned that the best results can only be achieved with very detailed software models (e.g. Windows Server 2019 Standard), because the more generic the software model (Windows Server Standard) is, the greater the overlap with other discovery models.

Best, Dennis

[Community Alums]

dreinhardt

We ran Job to create and associate Software Model to Discovery Model but unfortunately it created many generic Software Model mapping, which screwed all reporting. Major focus of the implementation was Lifecycle dates not entitlement so customer did not want to spend time creating and mapping Software Model.

Install Count field gives us numbers, It does not give us which Software Install is associated with Lifecycle dates hence we could not find Installed on -> Owner or Installed On -> Assigned To

2- Lifecycle functionality should be linked to SAM Pro license , why ServiceNow is modeling lifecycle based on what they have in SPM. Customer was not happy that SAM was not providing what ServiceNow sold it for and then they were trying to sell another product to get this working.