How does IBM BigFix Inventory work?

Manages assets across hundreds of thousands of endpoints

IBM BigFix Inventory offers a single console, single server, single intelligent agent view of all assets that is highly scalable and provides “always-on” software asset management to ensure audit readiness. It helps you manage software assets across hundreds of thousands of endpoints and can be installed throughout the entire enterprise in hours instead of weeks or months.

Delivers a comprehensive Software Identification Catalog

Simplify software identification with information on more than 8,000 software publishers, 40,000 software products and 105,000 application signatures. BigFix combines gathered inventory data with the software identification catalog to create a browsable warehouse and delivers continual updates through a cloud-based update service with information on commercial applications and publishers. It can be easily customized to track home-grown and proprietary applications with no coding required.

Enables enhanced reporting

Get reports on the health and compliance of software assets in minutes—regardless of the size of the environment—with both full reporting and sub-capacity reporting. Gain visibility into software license consumption to help plan software budgets based on inventory and usage trends. BigFix helps you plan for software upgrades and migrations by enabling administrators to determine which endpoints meet prerequisites; and sets security compliance policies for software and system configurations.

Provides discovery for software and processes

The solution offers discovery for software, processes, and file systems along with hardware usage and metering to help ensure audit readiness. These capabilities also provide cost savings and reduced security risk by identifying unused software. It allows users to browse data about software license usage to identify unused software and help limit audit and security exposures; and provides aggregated statistics and usage gathered by searching, filtering, sorting, viewing and exporting data.

Integrates with IBM software products

You can integrate BigFix Inventory with other IBM software products to extend management across the full software lifecycle —from procurement through retirement — including security compliance. Combine with IBM Control Desk for comprehensive software asset management—including software license reconciliation, contract management and service management. Or choose IBM BigFix Lifecycle for a complete software management solution and IBM BigFix Compliance for a complete security control solution.

BigFix Inventory: Custom Rules in Software Classification

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How customers use it

  • Manage software license compliance

    Manage software license compliance

    Problem

    Show the license utilization of products accordingly to the license metric being reported over time.

    Solution

    The BigFix All Metrics Report can gather the license utilization of deployed software products, verify usage over time, and compare this to owned license entitlements.

  • Hardware inventory

    Hardware inventory

    Problem

    Having a complete inventory view of the managed data center environment (physical servers, virtual servers, on-premise and hosted on public clouds).

    Solution

    IT Operators can easily drill down into individual machines, determine their current compliance against specific regulatory or organizational polices, and schedule remediation as required.

  • Identify unused software

    Identify unused software

    Problem

    Software Asset Managers and IT Security Analysts need to located software that is deployed but not being used to respectively reduce software license spend or mitigate security risks.

    Solution

    IT can use the hardware Inventory Report to see detailed hardware information gathered by the BigFix Inventory Hardware Scan. This data can easily be extracted into PDF or CSV files or added into external CMDBs via REST APIs.

  • Identify compromised software or binary file integrity

    Identify compromised software or binary file integrity

    Problem

    Security Analysts need to identify computers that might be running compromised binaries, or the IT Admin needs to ensure the integrity of binaries deployed in the file system.

    Solution

    The Scanned File Report can show the entire list of binary files deployed in the file system per managed computer, including the optionally generated MD5 and SHA256 cryptographic hash keys that can be used as search or filtering criteria.

  • Report on IBM Virtualization Capacity

    Report on IBM Virtualization Capacity

    Problem

    License Managers who are responsible for IBM licensing need to generate reports to meet IBM Passport Advantage Agreement Terms.

    Solution

    License Managers can use the IBM PVU Sub-Capacity Report to show that IBM products licensed and deployed in the environment are being reported for their license usage.

Technical details

Software requirements

Software requirements for IBM BigFix Inventory can be viewed at:

    Hardware requirements

    Hardware requirements for IBM BigFix Inventory can be viewed at:

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