Author: Srinivas Ramanujaiah

Many SAM Managers are looking for ways to apply their software entitlements to a specific environment or set of software installs.

A good example could be Microsoft Visual Studio Subscriptions or MSDN that allow organizations to install many Microsoft products on development or test environment only. This and adjoining benefits allow organizations the flexibility to develop and test several Microsoft applications but, in the process, can also lead to increased license compliance risk.

To mitigate this risk, SAM Managers can leverage software install conditions to specify a subset of software installation that should be counted during reconciliation.

Figure 1: Using Software Install Condition for Microsoft Visual Studio/MSDN

If configured as shown above, ServiceNow SAM will only consider the Visual Studio components installed on servers that are marked as dev/test in your CMDB. During the reconciliation process, these conditions are followed, leading to an accurate license compliance position.

One of the other important points to note is that any install condition added to a software model will be used on the software model level only. Unlicensed installs, that are excluded by the install condition of the software models, are aggregated to the product results level.

To illustrate this point please see the below diagram:

Figure 2: How does Software Install Condition work?

For example, a Microsoft SQL Server Software Model with Install Conditions set to “Installed on Dev Environment” has been specified to have entitlements with 100 rights. During Discovery and Normalization, ServiceNow SAM determines that all of the 100 rights would be consumed by the installation on dev environment only.

However, the system determines that there are additional 100 installs of SQL Server in production with no entitlements to support these installs. This will result in 100 unlicensed installs for MS SQL Server, and the list of unlicensed installs can be viewed in the ServiceNow SAM License Workbench.

Another related configuration to software install condition is the “License under management” attribute on the software model. If checked, the particular software is considered during reconciliation otherwise.