Software Asset Management Servicenow – SAM-Pro

SAM – Pro

A software asset is any application that an organization owns the right to use. 

Assets are created or acquired, used to support business activities, managed financially and operationally, and retired at the end of their useful life.

Software Asset Example:

• Control costs, risks, and complexity with transparency
• How do you match up software installations with entitlements you have purchased?
• Which software is compliant in the environment?
• How should that software be tracked?
• How can you ensure consistent data?
• How do you easily track costs and attain compliance?
• Gain Control Over IT Inventory
• Asset Lifecycle Management
• Strategic Inventory Planning & Procurement Forecast

2. SAM Terminology:

• Software model:A software model is a classification of an acquired software product. It provides a set of unique attributes, such as version and edition.
• Software Entitlement: An Entitlement is a right to use, access or consume an application or resource.
  • Example- A customer may purchase an Entitlement to use an application in “perpetual” license, or they may purchase a time-limited right to use an application (such as a one-year subscription license).
• Software allocation: Software allocations are used to assign one or more use rights to a specific device or user.
• Software discovery:Software discovery finds and recognizes software or a software feature on a device.
• Software reconciliation: Software reconciliation is the process of producing a compliance position by comparing the number of software rights acquired against the normalized software inventory.
• Software remediation: Software remediation provides options for resolving license rights compliance issues identified during reconciliation.
• Software reclamation: Software reclamation is the process of identifying unused software and uninstalling it so that the software rights for the user or device can be re-purposed.

3. IT Assets & Configuration Items

An IT asset is a technology component managed throughout its lifecycle for value, cost, contractual compliance, and usage. 

A configuration item (CI) is tracked for operational and relationship information. 

Example:

• Assets: Software License, Data, Datacenter etc.
  • Cost and contractual information needs to be tracked
• Configuration Item (CI): Database Instance, Corporate websites etc.
  • Operational relationships need to be tracked
• CI And Assets: Database server, Laptop, Desktops etc.
  • Both cost and operational relationships need to be tracked
• Consumables: Mouse, keyboard, USB etc.

4. IT And Software Asset Lifecycle

5. SAM Optimization Checklist

• Maintain compliance: Being compliant reduces the risk of damage to reputation and large, unplanned, compliance audit monetary findings.
• Optimize spend: Failure to manage request and usage of software has a large impact on IT budget.
• Support software audits: Complexity and frequency of compliance audits are increasing and are costly.
• Manage and track software licenses through their lifecycle
• Harvest licenses
• Purchase only what is needed
• Maximize product use rights
• Understand license metrics and deploy accordingly
• Pay maintenance only for software licenses being used

6. Plugins For Software Asset Management

Login to your developer instance and active the required plugins if you wanna practice in your personal dev instance.

Activating for your client environment you have to login with HI account.

• Software Asset Management Professional
• Software Asset Management Professional for Adobe
• Software Asset Management Professional for Citrix
• Software Asset Management Professional for IBM
• Software Asset Management Professional for SAP
• Software Asset Management Professional for VMware
• Software Asset Management UI Components
• Performance Analytics Premium for Software Asset Management
• Performance Analytics – Content Pack – Software Asset Management Professional

Software Entitlement

1. Software Entitlement Import

Software entitlement details are a vital component of software asset management. They identify how many rights you purchased to use the software in your environment. You can create them manually or through filling out a form

Software entitlements provide software license details that define user rights. They play a part in determining your compliance position (i.e., whether a user using a given software application has been correctly licensed to use the application).

2. Benefits of using software entitlements: 

• If the overall license allotment is exceeded, the Software Asset Manager can rapidly address the problem and return to compliant status by either removing unauthorized software or ordering more licenses.
• If the license allotment is not being used completely, the Software Asset Manager can respond by lowering the number of licenses purchased in the future.

Note: The sam_admin role is required to import entitlements.

3. To download to entitlement import template:

Navigate to Software Asset > Licensing > Import Entitlements 

As a best practice download the import template each time you import as there may be changes from release to release. 

SAM-TemplatesDownload

4. Entitlement Import Process

5. Entitlement Import Errors

1. Duplicate entry: If entitlement already exist

• Two validations are carried out to ensure that an entitlement is not a duplicate:
  • Coalesce on: publisher part number, purchased rights, purchase order, license metric, and license duration.
  • If above fails, coalesce on: software model, purchased rights, purchase order, license metric, and license duration.

2. Publisher Part Number not found: The entered publisher part number (PPN) for the software title was not found in the content library so a software entitlement could not be created. A customer can add the PPN to the library and create an entitlement.

3. Publisher Part Number and Software Model not found:The entered publisher part number could not be found in the content library and the specified software product could not be found in the system, so a software entitlement could not be created. A customer can add the PPN to the library or specify the software model so that a software entitlement can be created.

4. Multiple software models found for the Publisher Part Number: Many software products were found for the value specified, so customer needs to select one so that a software entitlement can be created.

5. Import template customized resulting in one or many fields being invalid: Someone added their own choices or other non-valid entries into the import template. Values can be fixed to create the software entitlement.

6. Purchased rights should be greater than 0: 0 or a blank value may have been specified in error. Once a value greater than zero is added, a software entitlement can be created.

6. Review and Clear Errors

To view the errors navigate to Software Asset > Licensing > Entitlement Import Errors.

As we fix each issue we will save the form and entitlements should automatically be created. 

1. Duplicate entry: We know this is not a duplicate as two of the same assets were purchased with one Purchased rights each.
   • Steps to resolve this issue:
     • Open on the line of the Duplicate entry error.
     • Click the Create Entitlement button to clear the error. 
     • Message displays successfully created Software Entitlement.
2. Publisher Part Number and Software Model not found: To resolve this issue update the Software Model and Product field
3. Publisher Part Number not found: Create pat number and update product field.

Software Asset Management (SAM) Lab

User Case:

ServiceNow Helpdesk have three product

• Asset Management System (AMS)
• CRM
• Digital Signature Certificate (DSC)

They sell their product on subscription and perpetual basis

Let’s say we have purchase all three product from ServiceNow Helpdesk. In order to maintain the license and cost we are going to use SAM professional.

1. SAM Roles:

• sam_user role has access to all features other than administrative [sam_admin] role and is inherited with the sam_admin role.
• The sam_admin role inherits the sam_user role and has permission to run reconciliation and manage reclamation rules.

2. Upload Software Model/ Product Catalog

Upload the model with the help of load data.

• Navigate to System Import Set > Load Data

SoftwareInstallsDownload

• Do enable Coalesce for u_installed_on and u_display_name
• Target Table = Software Installation [cmdb_sam_sw_install] 
• Navigate to Software Asset > Discovery > Discovery Models 

3. Normalization:

If ServiceNow can match information for the known software, it updates the Discovery Model with normalized data and some additional information about the associated installations.

• Manual normalization 
  • Navigate to Software Asset > Discovery > Discovery Models and look for the uploaded model.
  • Open the record with a Normalization status of Partially Normalized and enter the following:
    • Version: AMS 1.0.8
    • Platform: Windows
    • Language: English
• Pattern Normalization Rule: Update the record and note the Normalization status
  • Navigate to Software Asset > Administration > Patter Normalization Rule and create new record with below details:
    • Name: ServiceNow Helpdesk AMS 1.0.8
    • Discovered publisher contains: ServiceNow Helpdesk
    • Discovered product contains: AMS
    • Publisher: ServiceNow Helpdesk
    • Product: AMS
    • Product type: Licensable
    • Version: 1.0.8

4. Creating a Custom Product

Software asset managers need the ability to create and normalize products that are unknown by ServiceNow’s Software Library.  Creation of Custom Products allows organizations to normalize and account for software that is not yet part of the Software Library.

Navigate to Software Asset > Administration > Custom Product

Use below details

• Publisher = ServiceNow Helpdesk
• Product type = Licensable
• Product = AMS
• Product Classification = Asset Management

5. Reconciliation:

• One purpose of Software Asset Management is to ensure compliance with the vendor. 
• The process uses installation information to determine rights used and entitlement details to determine rights owned to calculate compliance.
• The process uses the cost of the entitlements purchased to determine an estimated cost to “true up” and achieve compliance or to let you know by how much you are over licensed. The reconciliation process also determines how many unlicensed installs you have.
• Run a reconciliation for all publishers. When the reconciliation is complete, view the Reconciliation Result and note the information provided.
• To legally run licensable software, you need to purchase software entitlements. To create Software Entitlement records in ServiceNow, you first need a Software Model record. This record also needs to identify what Discovery Models apply to match against entitlements. This can be done with pre-­defined or manually defined Discovery Maps.

6. Entitlement Metrics

Software Entitlements are counted in different ways. Some are counted per device, where every installation counts as a right used. Some are counted per user, where all the installations for a user count as a right used. Sometimes the number of rights used depends on hardware characteristics, such as how many processors the device has or how many cores are in the processors.

The License metric, defined on the Software Entitlement, identifies how the reconciliation process counts the rights used.

To change the entitlement metrics navigate to Software Asset > Licensing > Software Entitlement

7. Software Usage

The single most effective way to optimize software usage in an environment is to capture software usage information. This information can then be used to determine where software is underutilized or unused in the environment to allow it to be targeted for reclamation.

ServiceNow natively supports the import of usage data from Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), but other third-­party sources can be leveraged through a standard Import Set.

8. Reclamation

With software usage information in the system, you can create rules to determine when to identify potential entitlement rights to reclaim. For example, if software has been run for less than an hour over the course of 2 months, perhaps the user does not require it. Reclamation rules run on a regular basis (via the scheduled job “SAM – Identifying New Reclamation Candidates“) to identify rights that can potentially be reclaimed.