Tracking third party application installation requirements

[Marty_Parrish]

Within our organization we have hundreds of business applications and thousands of application services. However, we cannot look at an application listing to find out what the installation or system requirements are for installing and running that application within our enterprise. We cannot even tell if an application is compatible with a certain OS version or not, or which version of an application is compatible with what OS. Additionally, I can find no tracking of RAM requirements, processor requirements, graphics card specs required, or other dependencies such as .NET, JRE, or items like Visual C++ Redistributable Packages required.

This seems like such a basic set of information we should have on every application and service in our enterprise, but I have been told that Service Management does not have a way to track that. Is that true? I understand we have just upgraded to the Washington release of SM and that we have basically purchased every module and plug in from Service Now for SM.

I find it hard to believe there is not a simple table to store software installation or system application requirements. My tech staff has told me it just does not exist. Here is the basic information we would want for each application or service:

• Operating System:
• Windows 10 or later 
• macOS 10.15 or later 
• Linux distribution (e.g., Ubuntu, Debian) 
• Processor:
• Intel Core i3 or equivalent 
• AMD Ryzen 5 or equivalent 
• Memory (RAM):
• 8GB minimum 
• 16GB recommended 
• Storage (Hard Disk Space):
• 20GB free space for installation 
• Additional space for data files 
• Graphics Card:
• DirectX 11 compatible 
• Dedicated graphics card for demanding applications 
• Other Software Dependencies:
• Microsoft .NET Framework 
• Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 
• Visual C++ Redistributable Package 

Any directions and links to existing documentation would be appreciated.

Thanks

[dreinhardt]

Hi @Marty_Parrish,

Have you already found an answer to your question? Unfortunately, I have to agree with your colleagues and the statements that such a list or data sources do not exist within ServiceNow and therefore have to be created by yourself. The ITAM Content Team only provides information about life cycles, downgrade, suites, part number and hardware models, but does not maintain the requirements for every single piece of software that exists.

The interesting question now is where the maintenance of the information you require is best placed, since your requirements may certainly change even between the versions (1.0... 5.0) and therefore a general representation on the product would not be correct. 

In my view, the following place would be quite suitable, since here the complete life cycle is also included from the point of view of portfolio management:

Enterprise Architecture  > Technology Reference Model - TRM > Products

Within this object, it's possible to manage each product edition/version incl. life cycle phases and you can add all relevant details as part of the description field

Best, Dennis