[Music] how's it going everyone Ben Mills here principal product assessed architect or Ranger with service now and I'm bringing you a new series from setup to success essential tactics for software Asset Management we wanted to bring this forward because we wanted to help customers uh be able to get out of the blocks with software Asset Management uh once they've purchased it so uh we wanted to do a series that focused on the proper steps for implementation um and transitioning that into steps that we should take to achieve success with software Asset Management so uh for those of you if if you just purchased software asset management or are you a relatively new software Asset Management customer and and you don't know what to do next and you don't know what plugins to enable or what does what you are in the right place U because today we are going to be discussing just that uh before we get started um just let you know that uh this presentation may contain some forward looking statements and that those statements are covered under our Safe Harbor so with that out of the way so what is on the docket today as we go through our journey through software Asset Management first we're going to look at the installation right so we just want to make sure that we know everywhere that we need to go uh to install the appropriate plugins and also answer what are the appropriate plugins uh for us to inst install as well as um educate you on the features you can look forward to with those plugins next we're going to go through the configuration so what are some of the settings that we should look out for what are some of those actions uh that may speed up the process uh to get us ready for Success so we'll be walking through uh the configuration of software asset management and of course what does an asset management talk without the seem to be yes we will be delving into the cdb and Discovery considerations once we've established this Baseline through installation configuration and the scdb then we'll be ready to talk about success however for the purposes of this presentation we won't be getting too far into the topic of success this presentation this presentation is meant to set us up for part two of this series which will be next month here is where we're going to focus on those critical success items and things that we can do to identify those value streams inside of your organization with that out of the way let's get started so we are going to be spending the bulk of our time uh in the installing and configuring of software Asset Management uh try to make this very simple for us to follow so without further Ado let's get started all right we have rights for software Asset Management the first thing we want to do is get that plug-in enabled now with software Asset Management uh we need to request it via the support portal so whoever in your organization uh is kind of managing um the logins for service now support we would have them go in select a Target instance um ask for software Asset Management professional and then choose a time um for that plug-in to be activated now once we've actually requested software Asset Management uh I I wanted to bring you guys to the SAS license management because um I've seen with a lot of customers that there's a misconception that uh software Asset Management um once we install it and activated SAS license management is also installed that's not the case so what we're going to do is once we've requested software Asset Management Pro from support we want to go to the service now store it's at the service now store where we're going to go ahead and request an installation of SAS license business management so those out of thee boox Integrations uh with SAS applications Integrations with SSO providers uh like OCTA and Azure ad right requires that this plugin be activated so uh don't forget once we actually get software Asset Management professional from the support portal to go to the service now store and then install SAS license management now for those of us who are coming from itsm Sam or Sam foundations uh there are some steps that you may want to take so this section is going to be for you um this is going to be um what what do we need to consider when migrating from itm Sam over to Sam Pro okay so um a few things that we want to be aware of there's going to be some new table uh labels so in itm Sam um Alm license was originally called software license it's not going to be called software entitlement uh in itm Sam the Alm entitlement user was formerly known as user entitlement it will now be known as user allocations and then Alm entitlement asset was formerly known as device entitlement they will now be known as device allocations there's going to be a few functions that are now disabled so license and software counters uh this was a scheduled job that triggered um for Sam uh for for itm Sam foundations uh this is deactivated uh reconciliation is going to be doing this now in Sam Pro uh the auto match functionality which try to match Discovery models with a corresponding um software model that is deactivated as well uh the navigation menu for software Asset Management plugin is deactivated and renamed um and then the Legacy business rules in itm Sam are going to be disabled now one important thing is is once we enable software Asset Management professional uh the software install table it's going to be that foundational table for Sam Pro uh a lot of the reconciliation that we see in software Asset Management professional is based on that table um so for that reason if there's some software installation data that we Ed to to house in the seem to be software instance table when we were in itm um Sam would need to be migrated over to the software install table if it wants to get considered into Sam Pro so we would navigate to software asset Administration and then we would migrate that software install data from the software instance table uh over to the software install table and again that is if you have software install data that we want to track um immediately in the software install table now I will say that our recommendation is normally to if we have a discovery tool like an secm or service now Discovery let's just populate the software Asset Management table with those Discovery sources just to make sure that we have the latest and greatest um software install information populating the the table that's just going to help with functions like normalization uh as well as the accuracy of the reconciliation process um couple of things that we also want to consider is if we make customizations to the software license table so to Alm license to Alm entit user uh to to to software models this may cause upgrades for these tables to be skipped As you move to Sam Pro so keep that in mind uh if if we do have a situation to whereas some of the these upgrades were skipped we can remediate these via the upgrade history so we would head to uh the upgrade history uh section and we can see that there are changes skipped and in this example we have 22 changes skipped uh that is where we would go and remediate those upgrades that were skipped okay so now that we've migrated it from Sam to Sam Pro let's talk a little bit about publisher packs um so publisher packs if you install the software Asset Management professional Master plug-in you will also install all of the publisher packs um so let's go through what publisher packs are so in many organizations 80% of the software spin is likely in these tier one Publishers and with these tier one Publishers they have specific metrics or specific architectures that need to be in place in order to get a compliance position that's where publisher packs come into play um by installing these publisher packs we ensure that we've put in place all the necessary functionality needed to get a good compliance position on these tier one Publishers now if you don't um activate the S Master you would need to go in and make sure that we install each of these publisher packs um I have the plug-in names over here to the right uh if you've already enabled Sam Pro wouldn't be a bad idea to just go in and verify that uh all of these plugins are activated okay now that we've activated our publisher packs let's move on to the installation of the content portal so the Content Library portal what does that do well it gives you a search feature that allows you to search through uh the content tables in software Asset Management professional so you can um look for information like life cycle dates or versions and part numbers for software that you may uh look to uh purchase so you can actually find the uh content lookup table in the workspace here uh you would put in the product name or model ID if we're dealing with Hardware or part numbers and then uh the Content Library will pull back uh all the information that we have uh on that product Hardware on software um that you may need now depending on your version of service now you may have to also go go in and request to install the Sam workspace which is going to follow the same process as requesting uh Sam pro professional um Whoever has the service now support account in your organization um list the target instance we're going to request the software asset workspace and the time slap that best fits the software Asset Management workspace is fantastic it really makes operationalizing software asset manage uh management very accessible by doing things like providing you with those key metrics around it cost management uh key metrics around optimization actions that you can take as well as key metrics around what are those very important things that I need to take care of right now which impacts or impedes the health of my software Asset Management professional setup in addition to operationalizing software Asset Management it does a very good job um when it comes to our compliance um so this is going to replace the Legacy license workbench um you're you're going to see more of a percent based compliance uh per publisher but also it's going to provide you with features that give you some self- enablement by identifying software models missing Discovery Maps or software models missing uh installations or software models missing things like entitlement so a very very good tool to ensure the asset management staff can uh kind of come in look at these uh metrics and provide some value next we want to talk a little bit about the itm health check again depending on the version of service now that you have you may have to come in and request an install of the itm health check this can be done via the service now store so with the item health check um this is another major uh self- enablement feature that we can have inside of software asset manager professional um it's going to come in and give you measurements to identify uh any data gaps any process gaps um any configuration gaps that we may have um which is impacting your ability to get an accurate compliance position on products inside of Sam Pro uh these issues can be Downstream like in Discovery uh it can be with reconciliation or it could be uh data gaps that we may see on an entitlement so um this will give you a score um in addition we do have specific Suites uh that these results can come in so that way you can understand things that you may need to do to improve your Windows server or SQL Server compliance in Sam Pro this feature is found in the workspace under the success portal and there will be a tab for health check I recommend you get in and you run this because as you get findings in the reconciliation or Discovery or or entitlements uh these findings also come with remediation steps and in a lot of cases links to document ation that will help you to remediate these findings so uh highly recommend uh customers get this installed okay so that takes care of the installing software Asset Management portion of configuring Sam Pro for Success we will now move on to configuring software Asset Management ment so the first thing we're going to look at is the execution of the content job so one of the features in Sam Pro is access to our curated content a lot of this content is used in functions like the normalization function for instance well what we can do is we can navigate to system definition under this scheduled jobs and we can sort on the scheduled jobs whose application is software Asset Management professional from here we can kick these content jobs off so that they can start populating uh their intended tables we can always go to the workspace and check where we are as far as our content so uh if we head over to software asset analytics and under normalization in content we have a section called Central data service download status here we can see all of our content mappings we can see our current content Count versus our expected count always recommend coming in just to check to make sure that we are up todate with the latest and greatest counts now that we've kicked off the content jobs and our content tables are populated let's move over to content Service setup so under software asset Administration we will see a link for Content Service setup and there will be an option for you to opt into content upon doing so you will notice that uh you will have enabled six categories for content to be enabled uh and the intent here for the content Service setup is to improve the the software recognition ratio of Sam Pro so what do I mean by that well uh customers in their own instances right they have their their library of software and and they have their own specific normalization rates and sometimes you may get software that may be new or Niche or perhaps uh there's no mappings for well by enabling content what happens is whenever there's in any unrecognized software that unrecognized information is reverse fit back to the itam content Services team where they can look through it and research it and see about added it to our curated content uh for additions to our curated content those are downloaded by our customers uh during that Weekly content download so that's what content service does now I want to make a point very very clear opting into content is only responsible for the reverse feeding of unrecognized software information whether you're oped to content or not you're always going to get this weekly download of our curated content so just wanted to make that perfectly clear and another question that we always get is hey Ben what if I want to opt into content however I don't want data reverse fit back to service now for proprietary software that's perfectly fine you do have the ability to go to the product record and check a box to exclude it from content services so that way you can specifically exclude software that you don't want to have reverse fed while also keeping intact the reverse feed for your third party software whenever it's unrecognized so I just thought I'd bring that up Okay so we've got our content Services enabled let's talk a little bit about normalization data services going to spend just a moment here so normalization data service a lot of folks get confused with normalization data services because they're under the impression that it is an asset management specific feature normalization data services is actually a platform feature it is responsible for normalizing or standardizing The Core Company table which impacts any application within the N platform that's going to use the Core Company table so let's use an example so for example let's say that Discovery discovers a lab laptop and that laptop's manufacturer is Dell well Discovery has the ability to create a Core Company record uh in the table for Dell but let's also say that you have a procurement system and you've made a purchase with Dell and you are feeding that contract information over you're feeding that purchasing information over your procurement system may also be a source of creating a Core Company record for Dell and let's say that we have a person an individual on the procurement team or an individual on the vendor management team and they also have manually created a record for Dell in The Core Company table the issue is we have three sources now re referring to Dell and all of these three sources have the ability to refer to Dell three different ways so the role of normalization data services is to create what's called a canonical value for Dell so that across the platform whether Dell is referred to by the individual or by the discovery Source or by the procurement system is going to map to one common name so that way if we're choosing a Core Company record Dell is only going to show up one way it's a way to provide business continuity around the way we refer to companies across the entire platform that is normalization data services now the reason why we are talking about it here is because normalization data services does have a step in it that is specific to software Asset Management so now that we've uh gone ahead and we've downloaded our content mappings which publisher information is a part of we can utilize the software Asset Management portion of the NDS guided setup to kick off the normalization of the software publisher information so this is a step that we can also take as well which brings us to properties so now that we've got done with normalization data services let's take a look at our properties now um there is no prescriptive this property should be Ena versus that property is enabled but I do want to take the time to talk about the purpose of of properties so um a big portion of the software asset properties have to do with behaviors specific to reconciliation like if we want to group our reconciliation results by department or Coster well this is a property that we can configure in properties if we want to enable the use of custom license metrics this is also a property that that we can uh toggle um so really if there are specific um uh uh elements of your organization that we need to consider in the reconciliation process I would recommend that we come in and we configure our properties here we have a look at the software Asset Management Properties you can see the first two really have to do with grouping um for reconciliation but we also have properties that enable the automatic creation of software models um we have properties that uh allow us to use Affinity rules um so make sure we look through these properties with the understanding of our environment as we choose which ones to toggle on and toggle off I did leave a link um to our service now Doc which goes through each property and their definition and what beh Behavior you you could expect um but I definitely recommend you going through and and understanding what properties make sense for you as a customer to enable and finally for the configure section we want to take a look at the roles now we won't get too deep into roles in this session um but in part two where we start talking more about success and we start talking about software Asset Management more from a practitioner standpoint uh we uh we may re revisit roles but for now for the purposes of this um just know the roles that come with software Asset Management professional which is your Sam admin your Sam user your developer your integrator and your Sam spend import uh here we have a table which shows a description of what each Ro does and the roles they contain so you can take a moment to peruse this um but this is where we want to make sure that we've identified um those individuals who are going to be responsible for communicating metrics versus setting up entitlements uh uh versus uh setting up Integrations we want to start identifying those individuals rules in your organization so we can make sure that we have these roles uh doled out to the right people okay so that concludes the configuring of software Asset Management okay let's talk about the cdb an important message on the cdb service now Sam has a high dependency on the cdb full stop so software Asset Management in short is more than just being able to see software installs in your environment that's where it starts but it's much more than that we need to understand the host that the software resides on we need to be able to see its markers or attributes What relation ships do these CIS have to other CIS and what bearing on licensing does it have what state are these CIS in do I have installed software on retired CIS these are all bits of information that are stored in what's known as a cmdb in product success I get a lot of customers who come to me with hey I I have this software I have enough licenses yet I go to my license workbench and for some reason none of my licenses are being consumed the majority of the time I can point to something that is a Miss in their cdb for instance a piece of soof software installed on a VM that has no relationship to a physical host that is a common occurrence that I see where that missing relationship has now uh disabled the reconciliation process from functioning normally what are some of those common Sam impacting seem to be issues that we see in product success missing CIS where the CI isn't in there duplicate CIS stale CIS missing attributes that's a big one how many CPUs does this CI have how many cores per CPU what OS is it running these are things that can impact reconciliation missing relationships VM to physical host physical host a cluster hey what if you have vmw distributed resource scheduler and you have host Affinity rules right these are all relationships that we need in this seem to be for reconciliation to function properly and install status customizations what if we replaced retired with some other install status well that's an example of a Sam impacting customization to a CI so as we're getting our software Asset Management program stood up and enabled always keep the scene to be at the Forefront of your mind and and always think about the impacts that it's going to have the downstream impacts that it's going to have on Sam Pro and I think that neatly brings us into populating the software install table so let's start with data center software for for Data Center Software we're definitely going to want uh horizontal based Discovery our recommendation here is service now Discovery um it is uh horizontal base but also it has the outof thebox patterns that allows for the software installed data the CI data the relationship data um to be placed in the appropriate tables so that reconciliation can recognize it and Factor it in um when getting a compliance position for enduser compute um secm is our recommendation as it fulfills uh the most use cases in S pro when it comes to desktop computers looking at this slide um this is a comparison Matrix that we made with the service craft connectors uh out there product management did a fantastic job of putting this together but it highlights uh sort of our recommendations so if we look at uh it time agent client collector sgm and SG Jam um you can see where where these in user device Discovery sources um do fit the bill for the vast majority of Sam Pro use cases you can see where sgsm uh fulfills all of them once we start getting over to the tanium in tune VMware we start seeing some gaps and those gaps can impact functions like normalization or metering and Reclamation um all factors that need to be considered um for example right we I I get cases sometimes where users have really low normalization rates and they can't figure out why and I look at their Discovery source and if they're using a discovery Source where publisher information isn't coming back for that particular dis Discovery source and that's going to impact s Pro's ability uh to normalize the publisher information so those are things you want to keep in mind as you're setting up Sam Pro uh that the discovery sources are fit for purpose what are some helpful tips when it comes to populating the software install table number one I would say um minimize the amount of Discovery sources feeding your software install table in other words understand what your use cases are and if you can satisfy all of your use cases with only two Discovery sources make it two Discovery sources if if you have an environment where you have SG secm SG VMware workspace one SG t ium um you know the question has to be asked well is are there competing use cases um that justifies all three of these existing in populating your software install table so definitely want to make sure that we are using the um the uh minimal amount of Discovery sources to satisfy your specific use case here's a big one shut off the Legacy secm plugins once s secm is up and running so um secm V 2012 and secm V 2016 were the Legacy plugins for grabbing those secm Imports and populating the software install table until an update was made and um those Legacy plugins were no longer bringing in the remove software install data which is why we moved over to SG secm we want to make sure that we shut off those Legacy plugins because well why we moved to sgsm in the first place well because remove software installed data wasn't coming in through those Legacy plugins and we don't want to continue having those Imports uh gummy up or putting in bad install data into your install table so make sure that once you move over to sgm that those Legacy secm plugins are disabled and kind of in the same line if we're migrating from a legacy secm plugin to sgm try doing a clean import if if we have the appetite for it um we definitely recommend uh go ahead and try and Purge your software install table if we can and just do a clean import of do a clean full import of sgcm uh so that we can make sure that there is no stale data uh present keep it time Discovery up to date keep those patterns uh up to date pretty straightforward but this is something that that we see commonly where where it time Discovery is is just out of date and then uh finally make sure that the discovery sources that you're using are compatible with Sam Pro referencing that Matrix uh that we looked at in the previous slide okay so here are some links to the materials that I covered uh in this presentation with a little bit more detail so we have an askar Ranger series uh where we do more detailed videos on some of the topics that were covered today we only had an hour uh but if you want step-by-step guidance video guidance on requesting software asset management or implementing content services or installing NDS um or or installing the Content Library portal you can go ahead and scan these QR codes and that'll take you right uh to the specific YouTube video I hope you found today's session very informative um I hope we made the process of uh getting s up and running uh digestible and accessible um again I look forward to seeing you all next month when we do part two of this series where we delve into more of okay we have the tool up and running and configured how do we start setting ourselves up for Success which will be part two so I look forward to seeing you then thank you