Creating snapshots of license metric utilization for auditing purposes

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Create the snapshot from the All Metrics report, and store it as a record of license metric utilization in your enterprise. You can create the snapshot with any frequency that is suitable for your purposes. You can also regenerate the snapshot at any time as the historical data is always editable. However, it is required to have snapshots for the past two years available in case of an audit. Thus, it is a good practice to create the snapshot every quarter and store them for two years.

Before you begin

An icon representing a user. You must have the following permissions to perform this task:
  • View License Metric to open the All Metrics report.
  • View Audit Trail if you want the snapshot to contain the audit trail file.

About this task

Licensing requirements
Audit snapshot is a valid document for audit purposes. When you generate it, you fulfill reporting requirements specified by Sub-capacity (Virtualization capacity) licensing rules. For more information, see: Sub-Capacity FAQs.
Completeness and accuracy of data
To ensure completeness and accuracy of data that is contained in the audit snapshot, ensure that:
  • Software scan data is collected from the entire environment. To verify whether there are any problems, check the Software Scan Health widget on the Overview panel.
  • Capacity data is collected from the entire environment. To verify whether there are any problems, check the Capacity Scan Health widget on the Overview panel.
  • Imports of data are successful. To check the import history, go to Management > Data Imports.
  • Software is correctly classified. For more information, see: Software classification.

Procedure

  1. In the top navigation bar, click Reports > All Metrics.
  2. Optional: To configure the period for which you want to create the snapshot, hover over Configure, and click Configure View. Then, select the time range.
    • If you specify a period from a particular date until the last successful import, the reports contain entries from that date starting at 00:00:00.
    • If you specify a period from a date to a date, the reports contain entries from the first date starting at 00:00:00 to the second date ending at 23:59:59.
  3. Optional: To limit the number of products that are included in the snapshot, specify the name of the product in the Filters section.
    The screen capture shows how to limit audit snapshot to a single product.
    Note: The content of the audit snapshot reflects the report view from which it is generated. If you apply filters on the All Metrics report or its derivatives, the audit snapshot is limited to the filtered data only.
  4. To create the snapshot, in the top navigation bar, click Audit Snapshot.
  5. Optional: Provide a comment in the comment text field.
  6. Optional: To add an attachment, click Browse and select the file that you want to attach to the snapshot.
  7. Click Generate.

Results

The audit_snapshot_date_time.zip file is downloaded to your computer. The date that is provided as part of the file name is expressed in the GMT time zone. For information about the content of the file, see: Content of the audit snapshot.