The software catalog provided by IBM is maintained in Tivoli® Software Knowledge Base Toolkit. It contains information about software publishers, products, and signature definitions that allow products to be detected by inventory scans and usage tracking. Apart from the IBM catalog, you can also create and maintain a custom catalog that stores information about proprietary products that are installed in your IT infrastructure.
The IBM® software catalog is published on a monthly basis and can be downloaded from the IBM website. It contains signatures, which can be files, registry entries, or other identifiers that act as fingerprints for identifying software products. When one of these signatures is matched with raw data that is collected from the endpoints in your infrastructure, information from the catalog, such as the vendor, software product, and version that correspond to that signature is displayed in the Explore Inventory report in Software Use Analysis.
The custom catalog can be created and maintained by using the built-in catalog management functionality that is available in Software Use Analysis. You can create and edit custom publishers, products, and simple software signatures that are used to detect that software. However, the built-in functionality cannot be used to create complex signatures. Such signatures can be created by using Tivoli Software Knowledge Base Toolkit.
Signatures can be edited only in the application in which they were created. If you use both simple catalog management functionality and Tivoli Software Knowledge Base Toolkit for catalog customization, entries from both sources are not overwritten. However, they might be duplicated. In such a situation, you can decide in which application you want to continue maintaining such entries.
The diagram represents the catalog definition for the product Draw Pro. It shows how the various catalog definitions are related and how they provide a structure that supports software identification.
Draw Pro is available as a native program on Windows and UNIX systems. The component definitions represent physical programs and are linked to the product structure at release level. The signature definitions are used to identify the programs. The software catalog uses different types of signatures. The most common types are file and registry signatures. File signatures and registry signatures are represented by package strings, which come from the Uninstall keys in Windows registry or from various packaging systems on UNIX endpoints. When particular software is installed on a computer, it leaves a specific artifact in a file system or registry that identifies that product. In this case, the signature for Draw Pro 1.1 on Windows is draw11.exe and on UNIX is draw11.bin. If either of these files is discovered on an endpoint, Software Use Analysis tries to match it against software catalog entries during the import process. When it finds a match, it can identify the product as Draw Pro 1.1.