[Music] hi my name is Sean Walker and I'm a principal product success architect and part of the Ranger team here at service now today I'm going to be talking to you about removal candidates and the software Reclamation so we're going to talk today about what removal candidates are we're going to take a look at the Sam 9.0 process from the Sam process guide and we're going to talk about reclaiming software installations and then I'm going to get into a demo and do some Reclamation and go through the flow with you what are removal candidates removal candidates is a list of software installations that can be uninstalled from your environment there's a couple of different processes within service now that can create these removal candidates the first is the Reclamation rules so when Reclamation rules conditions are met um Reclamation or sometimes they're sometimes called Reclamation candidate sometimes called removal candidate depends on what you're reading but they are generated when those Reclamation rules are met and I have done a separate video on Reclamation rules and setting those up so be sure to watch that um the next way that removal candidates get created is through through the remediation options so when a s manager is doing their reviewing their compliance position and reviewing their specific entitlements in their in their license usage dashboard under the remediation options they're going to have the option to to generate a removal candidate for some installations uh another way they get generated is uh automatically by restricted software installations so software models can be flagged as restricted and when those in installations are detected um for that software model those removal candidates get automatically created and lastly you can also create removal candidates manually so this is the software asset management process guide Sam 9.0 uh or optimized software installation process so if you guys don't have a copy of the Sam process guide I definitely recom recommend you go take a look at that and and download a copy for yourself so the process guide can be found on the now create website um which is part of now learning so I definitely recommend going out there look for Sam process guide and get a copy of this so when we start talking about removal candidates and we start talking about recl reclaiming software entitlements this is the process that talks about that so as you can see here part of this process um we we've got the Sam 9.3 which is the create and update removal candidates right we talked about how those can get created um by the Sam manager right as they're doing their like reviewing their license usage we've also got the Sam 9.2 right which is the monthly software usage report so your Reclamation candidates are going to be generated by Reclamation rules based off that software usage um there's also the Sam 9 for which is um execute the Reclamation rules to and create software removal requests so that's the process where um the St manager is going to actually U choose to reclaim the software we'll talk about that in a minute and then and then so on and so forth right you do have the option to notify the users um before you remove it or not Etc so we're going to go through that in a bit more in the demo as we talk through the flow as well so what happens in with reclaiming software installation so what is the process so what happens in service now is when a removal candidate is created the Sam manager then has the option to either reclaim that software or or uh close skip that particular record there might be reasons why they want to ignore that particular Reclamation candidate or removal candidate um so when the reclaim option is selected it's going to trigger the Reclamation workflow behind the scenes so when you're setting up your your Reclamation candidates uh if you watch that other video there's this little you know you'll see that there's this little check box you can enable which is notify users so when that has been selected and this reclaim process starts the user will be sent an email and asking them if they telling them their their software is going to be removed uh if they need to keep it they need to basically go through an approval flow which is kicked off as well so for on premise software installations those can be removed manually which by generating a task um for the teams to manually uninstall that software or they can be removed automatically but to remove it automatically um you need to be using C Cent software distribution um 2.0 so client software distribution um is a separate plugin that needs to be installed and configured um to be able to do the removal of software installations um the key thing here is that you know not only do you need to configure client software distribution in your instance and connect it up to the seccm environment the seccm environment is also going to need to have all of those um packages those uninstallation packages created so that you can actually trigger those through the Reclamation process so you definitely want to take time planning and testing um the automatic removal of on premise software installations um using CSD now if it's a SAS subscription those can again be removed manually or by generating a task to remove the subscription right from the Publisher's API or they can be done automatically with an API call to that publisher um now the important thing to note here is not all Publishers will basically publish on their API a method to remove that subscription so that's something to to really keep in mind each publisher is going to be different um so you really also need to understand is what what happens when you reclaim a SAS subscription what API call will be triggered what will actually happen in that Publisher's a uh portal so you really want to make sure that the default behavior of what our integration with that SAS provider is going to do so for example do you want to automatically delete the subscription right um because some of those some of those publisher um Reclamation flows actually remove remove the user from the portal and subsequently it removes all the data associated with that user and your companies might have some sort of data retention policy that needs to be adhered to so you may or may not be able to use the out of thee boox Reclamation for the SAS Publishers if it doesn't meet your business needs so I highly recommend you checking out the service now Doc reclaim user subscriptions and in it'll tell you uh what each one of these particular um direct Integrations with these SAS providers is going to do when you reclaim that software so now I'm going to jump into an instance of Washington and I'm going to show you the um Reclamation candidates or removal candidates okay so I've logged into my Washington instance of service now with some Ware Asset Management installed and I'm going to take you through removal candidates and then walk you through reclaiming uh software installation and the steps you need to take so to get to the um software or sorry the removal candidates you go to the license usage workbench and you can actually see all the removal candidates here so we select removal candidates and this is going to give us the ability to you know add some more columns so I have added a few extra columns here just so you guys could see a bit more information um and so really what we wanted to do is you can actually go ahead and you can sort these by different states um so we're just going to group this by state so you can see all the different states here because these are all the different phases that these particular removal candidates are going to you see there's quite a few uh removal candidates in in my particular demo instance because I do have quite a few Reclamation rules set up that are tracking software usage um so you can sort removal candidates just to kind of see where they are right is okay here's some attention required I might need to take a look at there's some here that are a waiting um user approval and there's some here that are in the process of just waiting for those installations or subscriptions to be removed as part of their flow and then there's a bunch closed some skipped Etc um so that's one way you can kind of group and look at these different removal candidates just going to clear this out here now and what we're going to do today is we're going to um go through and look at removing one for windzip so I'm going to just take a quick look here and we can see we've got seven removal candidates in the system for for windzip and some of them are at different stages right this one's closed complete this one already been processed and it's awaiting actual removal of the software and then we've got these four additional ones here that are all ready to actually reclaim and we can see here by the description right they're on different assets um or different CIS have these installation records so I'm an asset manager and I want to remove windzip all these installations of windzip from my environment actually maybe I'll just do just do um one manually first so we're just going to go through and do one manually and say okay let's take a look at this particular Reclamation candidate this is dco2 so this is a domain controller I don't really want to process an automatic Reclamation for this it's probably okay that this is here we're just going to close skip this and so I can just address this particular Reclamation candidate by choosing close Skip and save that record so now that one will move to the close skip State and then we can look at going ahead and maybe reclaiming um one or all of these particular Reclamation candidates so um if I I want to go ahead and remove all these things what I will do here is now click on the reclaim all and what that's going to do is it's going to kick off the Reclamation flow so I'm just going to go into one of these Reclamation candidates here and you see it's already at the awaiting revocation state so what I'm going to do is you can actually see the workflow and you can actually see the workflow and where this particular Reclamation candidate is in the flow so I just want to take a few minutes here to talk about the Reclamation flow because it's a little bit complex so the Reclamation flow gets triggered when you click on that reclaim button right and then it determines whether or not um it needs to uh go through an approval process so if you remember when we created a Reclamation Rule and we went through that video there was the option to notify the user so when you notify a user it will um create an email approval for them that they have to either accept or reject so why don't I pause the video I'm just going to go find one of those emails to show you what they look like so one minute okay so I went into the email um and I just found one here that's an actual uh email that was triggered for um requesting approval so this is you know not as pretty a version as the end user will receive but basically as you can see here it says Adobe Systems has been flagged for Reclamation due to low usage do you still still need this software on asset IBM so that's particular asset that it would be trying to reclaim against and so the user has the option to yes keep the software or no remove the software so if they click on no it's going to not trigger the approval flow but if they click on yes I need to keep this the the default approval flow would be go to their manager for approval to keep the software so that's what this section is here about all these are about approvals and waiting uh for approvals Etc so once the approvals have finished it'll come down and it will run this particular script and what this script does is this is a Reclamation flow for any type of software so if you remember when we talked about in the presentation all the different types of software that may have different methods of reclamation be it SAS or on premise um this is where the flow will determine what to do with it and so since windzip which is the one we were looking at the flow here that was triggered for windzip is installed software right so it's installed on a device um it's taken this path and so what'll happen is it will go into the uh finish State and for some reason I can't see my uh Mouse to scroll over here oh there it is um um it is now finished so um so the the actual workflow for windzip is finished if it was either with subscription software it would take a different path and um or could potentially trigger say for example um if that particular SAS publisher has a Reclamation flow for it that will do a reclaim on the Publishers API that would get triggered as part of the script that's behind this so it's a very complicated script behind this that knows how to determine whether the installation is installed software locally or whether it's subscription software and then to take a look at what type of software is and and does it have a Reclamation flow um if you had CSD client software distribution installed for some of this installed software it would also kick off the Reclamation Point uh part with client software distribution and reclaim it through SCCM or jamp rening whatever you have already configured in your instance so this is the workflow behind it and this is the script that really dictates what actions need to be taken um to remove the software now my instance does not have client software distribution um installed so I don't have an secm environment that I can have automatically removed the software so what's going to happen is um that particular and sorry I was just filtered on some Adobe stuff here um just let me go back and find that Reclamation candidate for windzip um it's not actually going to do anything so the process is a manual process since my instance doesn't have any automated removal Tech capabilities it is a manual process to remove these particular um these particular installations now you could if you wanted to make a copy of the Reclamation flow and add in a task creation step in that flow um but again you'd want to make a copy of the Reclamation flow make the other one inactive and modify the copied version uh it's never a good idea to modify any of our outof the Box flows so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to rerun the integration to up my installation information cuz these um installations of windzip are being manually uninstalled by our team and then once that integration is done you're going to see what happens now that the software installation gets removed from these devices what will happen to the uh Reclamation or removal candidates okay so now uh I've finished reimporting all my data and those software installations are no longer on those machines so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to kind of force the update to happen on those Reclamation candidates so the Reclamation candidates um update uh weekly so there's a job that identifies sorry Reclamation candidates I sorry the identify runs weekly and the update I think runs daily um and that's the one that is going to we need to run to update these Reclamation candidates kind of move things through a little faster for our video purposes so yes actually this runs weekly so you know even if your reclaims reclaims and uninstalls do take a long time so that's why these jobs only run weekly so uh I'm going to click on execute now and I'm going to let this job run this job will take a little bit of time to run so we're going to pause the video and just wait for this one here updating Reclamation candidates to finish okay so the updating the Reclamation candidates job is finished so let's go take a look at those uh removal candidates and see what has happened since then okay so I'm in the removal candidates it's already filtered for windzip here and just do a quick refresh oops let's do this again we will do a windzip all right there we go so now it's filtered on removal candidates and it's got all the ones we had before for windzip and we can see they've all now been moved to a state of close complete except for that one we did manually ourselves for that dc2 uh where we ski that one uh all the rest of the installs were removed by our team they went out and did all the installs at CCM or whatever the tool is captured the inventory that hey that software was removed that installation record got removed from service now and then that job ran to update these Reclamation candidates now one important thing to to note is that while I was removing windzip in this envirment we can see here the potential savings was zero and that's because we didn't really have windzip configured properly it was just for demo purposes so we didn't really end up having any cost associated with that um but not all of your Reclamation candidates will be zero cost right so what's going to happen is you see for example um there's all these subscriptions for Facebook workplace happen to be in my instance um we could go kind of take a look at some of the other ones here um Facebook actually in this account here we go Atassi and Cloud Confluence rate so here's a bunch of of reclamation potenti potential savings so what happens when they go to a close complete is these potential savings are going to come around and be reflected here in the actual savings dashboard in your overview so this is a good way to show that hey we save this much money by reclaiming these software uh installations so that's why it's really important to make sure you're using a lot of the flows within the system rather than just you know taking a look okay I'm just going to go ahead and remove these if you don't click that reclaim button and Trigger that Reclamation flow and have it go through the necessary steps to complete those Reclamation candidates and finish off that process it's not going to start showing any of your actual savings you've gained from reclaiming those subscriptions and uh that pretty much concludes our um removal candidates video so in this video we talked about what removal candidates are we also reviewed the Sam 9.0 optimization optimized software installation process and that can be found within the process guide from now create we also talked about the removal can candidate process and then I went into the tool and showed you the removal candidate process and stepping through the process of reclaiming that software and then triggering that job to update those Reclamation candidates again you don't have to trigger that job manually it we'll do it automatically so for more information on removal candidates you can go to the service now product documentation site there's uh add remove add a software removal candidate so that a man for manually adding software removal candidates you can also go through and do software install installation optimization and removal and then there's also again the process guide on now create so the software asset management process guide I hope you found this video helpful and we'll see you in the next video