Software and hardware discovery

License Metric Tool discovers hardware and software in your IT infrastructure.

With License Metric Tool you can accomplish the following goals by using software and hardware discovery:

Manage software inventory
Monitor license consumption
Achieve basic license compliance
Create an inventory of hardware in the enterprise

Infrastructure analysis

The first step, before you start discovering software and hardware, is to obtain the baseline of computers that exists in your environment. Estimate the total number of computers and organize them into computer groups in the BigFix® console to avoid overloading the infrastructure.

Discovery of software and hardware

Collect information about your software, license compliance and hardware inventory. It is commonly achieved by activating the capacity and software scans in the BigFix console.

Discovery	Description
Software inventory	Software inventory is analyzed by the scanner that searches for different types of information to determine whether the software is installed. You should set up the appropriate software scans during the initial configuration of License Metric Tool. For more information, see: Types of software scans (BigFix scenario). Thanks to License Metric Tool you can understand and manage your software inventory, especially through the following practices: Discovering IBM software to view and classify your software inventory on the Software Classification panel. Measuring utilization of license metrics that are used within your organization. You can view the details on the All Metrics report that shows utilization of the assigned license metric by all instances of a particular product. However, it is limited to a subset of license metrics. For more information, see:License metric utilization. Estimating resource utilization of products that deliver .slmtags. The Resource Utilization report shows utilization of all license metrics that can be used by a particular product. However, the data is not aggregated and requires further processing. For more information, see: Raw utilization of license metrics.
Hardware information and capacity data	Thanks to License Metric Tool you can collect information about the processors and the processor capacity that is assigned to each computer in your infrastructure. Capacity scan Capacity scan collects data about the physical processor, system type (physical or virtual), guest operating system, and logical partitions. It must be activated on every computer, virtualization host and virtual machine. For more information, see: Initiating the capacity scan on all computers (BigFix scenario). Capacity scan on virtualization hosts To collect capacity data on Xen and KVM hosts, you need to activate an additional fixlet: Run Capacity Scan on Virtualization Hosts. For more information, see: Collecting capacity data from virtualization hosts for Xen and KVM (BigFix scenario). Capacity scan on virtual machines To collect capacity data on VMware, Hyper-V, KVM RHV-M, and Citrix Hypervisor (formerly XenServer), you must add relevant VM managers in License Metric Tool. For more information, see: Adding VM managers for VMware, Hyper-V, KVM with RHV-M, Citrix Hypervisor and Nutanix (BigFix scenario). The hardware information and capacity data are displayed on the Hardware Inventory report.

Discovery

Description

Software inventory

Software inventory is analyzed by the scanner that searches for different types of information to determine whether the software is installed. You should set up the appropriate software scans during the initial configuration of License Metric Tool. For more information, see: Types of software scans (BigFix scenario).

Thanks to License Metric Tool you can understand and manage your software inventory, especially through the following practices:

Discovering IBM software to view and classify your software inventory on the Software Classification panel.
Measuring utilization of license metrics that are used within your organization. You can view the details on the All Metrics report that shows utilization of the assigned license metric by all instances of a particular product. However, it is limited to a subset of license metrics. For more information, see:License metric utilization.
Estimating resource utilization of products that deliver .slmtags. The Resource Utilization report shows utilization of all license metrics that can be used by a particular product. However, the data is not aggregated and requires further processing. For more information, see: Raw utilization of license metrics.

Hardware information and capacity data

Thanks to License Metric Tool you can collect information about the processors and the processor capacity that is assigned to each computer in your infrastructure.

Capacity scan: Capacity scan collects data about the physical processor, system type (physical or virtual), guest operating system, and logical partitions. It must be activated on every computer, virtualization host and virtual machine. For more information, see: Initiating the capacity scan on all computers (BigFix scenario).

Capacity scan on virtualization hosts: To collect capacity data on Xen and KVM hosts, you need to activate an additional fixlet: Run Capacity Scan on Virtualization Hosts. For more information, see: Collecting capacity data from virtualization hosts for Xen and KVM (BigFix scenario).

Capacity scan on virtual machines: To collect capacity data on VMware, Hyper-V, KVM RHV-M, and Citrix Hypervisor (formerly XenServer), you must add relevant VM managers in License Metric Tool. For more information, see: Adding VM managers for VMware, Hyper-V, KVM with RHV-M, Citrix Hypervisor and Nutanix (BigFix scenario).

The hardware information and capacity data are displayed on the Hardware Inventory report.