[Music] hi my name is Shan Walker and I'm a principal product success architect and part of the Ranger team here at service now I'm going to be joined today also by anarie Duffy who's also a principal product success architect uh specializing more in the service craft connector area so today I'm going to be talking to you about software usage so here's what I'm going to be covering in today's video I'm going to talk about what what is software usage why is software usage important where does software usage data come from and then I'm just going to hop into an instance and just give a quick overview uh demo of software usage so what is software usage software usage is data that's used to provide information about about who's using a software product when the software product was last used how many times the software product is been accessed or the total time the software product has been used so this data can be found in the samp uh SW usage table so so why is software usage important so unused or underused sof software can be quite costly for most organizations the license harvesting process allows those organizations to reuse um and redeploy software that's already been procured Reclamation rules and removal candidates is the are the features used in service now to harvest those software licenses software usage data is used by the reconciliation rules to deter determine if a removal candidate should be created so where does software usage data come from and that data can come from many different sources uh and be brought into service now um one of the typical ways we see is through service graph connectors now it's really really really important to note that not all service graph connectors capture usage data um and just because because the discovery tool has the ability to capture usage data it doesn't actually mean that it is capturing usage data so a good example of this would be the seccm service graph connector while the service craft connector does automatically look for software's usage data uh unless seccm has the feature called secm metering enabled and they're metering for those specific applications there will be no software usage data so that's a really important thing to note is that yeah sure secm can capture usage data but has the seccm environment been configured to actually do that so that's really important for all service graph connectors um another waya it can come in is through SAS Integrations and once again not all SAS Integrations capture usage information a lot of them do um but not all of them do so a good example would be Adobe Adobe does not give usage information even if you were to go out to the Adobe portal you're not going to be able to see the last time a subscription is used even on the Adobe portal so it's definitely not imported through the SAS integration um a really good tool that that people should start leveraging or think about leveraging is service now's agent client collector so that is the agent that could replace the service graph connectors the need for SCM Jam fin tune those kind of things and you can use the agent client collector which does automatically capture software usage data with no configuration required and then of course you can also manually import software usage data so say for example you have a different Source um in your environment that does capture this usage data but there's no integration in service now you could export the usage information from that system and then do a bulk import of of that software usage information into service now okay so now I'm going to go and do show you a quick demo in know Washington DC release of service now okay so now I'm logged into a van or Washington instance of service now with software Asset Management installed and I'm just going to show you how to review the uh software usage data so I'm on the software asset workspace and I'm going to go down into the license operations dashboard and on the license operation dashboards here under Discovery you will see software usage so this is a view of that samp uhw usage table and this has a bunch of information that's already been imported into my instance from those various sources we talked about um and so we can go through and we can review some of the information you know so this is for Mike it's for Microsoft Publisher um and the recomendation type is set to uh last use time so there's some other good valuable fields on this table that you might want to think about viewing you can actually see uh sometimes see your Discovery Source you can see your last Ed time um you can see your total used minutes seconds if you want um you can also see some usage counts uh the user principal name that's something very very handy to have um because just like with the SAS subscriptions your user principal name on in your SAS provider portal is really what's going to be used to match against your user within um service now so those are just some of the things I usually add to my to my view here and we can add them and take a look right so now I can see um here's the last use time again this is older data in My Demo environment and again there's that UPN right so it's actually this is what's used to match the user principal name will match against the username within service now so there's a couple of ways um we can manually create create data within this table it's very simple you can click on new and actually create a software usage in uh record U manually if you would like so let's just go and put one in here um for Microsoft is the publisher and let's pick something like project and so here's Microsoft Project and so which CI is this going to be I think we have some um this is a CI name here just this is a CI for the asset manager uh what's the Reclamation type for this particular one total use time so when is this data for let's pick May or April which was last month they used it 25 times years 2024 and total use seconds I have no idea we'll just put 96,000 there we go and we can save this record so this how you would manually create software usage data um in in the system so now we can just take a look here for that user which was asset manager oh there's a lot of asset manager here it is here this one here asset manager Microsoft Project configuration asset item total use time and again I'd have to probably take a look and sort this since there's a lot of other data in there to find the particular record I just actually put in there so another way um asset managers can get usage data in if it's not coming in automatically through um one of the Integrations for SAS or through secm or any one of your service graph connectors say say they have a different system out there that has usage information but no integration you you can actually manually or bulk import um software usage data into this table as well so um I do have a transform map this is something you'll have to create your own transform map for so I do have a transform map that I created um for this just to bring in uh Records in bulk and we can take a quick look at it this I'm not going to go into detail on this on this video on how to create a transform map this is something that's going to be need to be done by an administrator because only administrators can do bulk import so you can see it's fairly simple I've got all of my fields from my uh template uh from my spreadsheet that I'm going to bring in I'm targeting these fields and I'm coalescing on several of the fields um automatically to make sure I'm not duplicating so I'm going to be coalescing on my publisher product user up again to make sure that I'm not doubling up or adding records that are already there so what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to go ahead and run this transform with some demo data and then come back and show you what it looks like okay so now I've gone in and I've done my bulk import of My Demo data and I want to take a look at it so I'm going to go back in again to my software usage table um I'm going to take a look at the created by and I know I created these records so I can just quickly filter by my name here so created by myself and we can see here what I've got so I can see all these records that I created via this discovery search which is my demo usage data and I can see all of the different information for that so my usage counts my products my Publishers my user my UPN everything that I managed to bring in um through that bulk update process and again here is the one that I created uh manually so next I'm going to be taking you through how secm usage data gets into play so I'm going to pause the video I'm going to get with my colleague anarie and we're going to talk about secm usage data in more detail okay so now I'm back and I'm being joined by my teammate an Marie welcome anarine hello thank you Sean ni to be here nice to have you all right so now we're going to be going ahead and we are going to be bringing in some usage data from seccm so we have an seccm environment connected to this instance and we actually are metering some software um some software products so what we're going to do today is we're going to actually bring back some of that usage data and show you how secm data gets brought in but first thing we're going to need to do is set up some Reclamation rules for that software so so what what software are we metering in that environment Amry and we're Google we're um doing chrome chrome okay so yes so we have metering enabled for Google Chrome and I'm not going to talk to you guys through the setup of a Reclamation rule because I've already done a video on this so if you haven't watched that please make sure you watch the other video on how to create a Reclamation Rule and so we're just going to leave it very basic it's total use time we're going to say 1 hour save that there we go and we are going to um add the product now so we're going to add the product we're wanting to bring metering data in for and so make sure we get the right one Google Chrome no not that one we want this one and we're going to hit save and then if we take a look here right this is an important piece is that we've selected the product Chrome and service now knows that Chrome is tied to the executable uh chrome.exe and that's really important because seccm doesn't when you set it up for metering you don't meter based off of a product it's looking for a very specific executable um so if you pick the wrong one in your software product list here it could very well have the wrong executable that secm is tracking the usage data for so what we're going to do now is we're going to go ahead or what actually should say what do we do next Amry how does seccm bring that data in yeah thanks Sean um so for inm there's a a software usage scheduled import job that you run um so if you go down to actually if you want to show first the data source um that that's associated with the software us job you can show um like out of the box what the data source is or um from the last time you used it and we can see here that um Chrome is not in here in this SQL query what happens is that the software usage job it looks up the Reclamation rules table um to see what um Reclamation rules you have to find and then based on that it'll dynamically update the SQL query to include it'll be included in our new Chrome um product in this query so we can see here that Chrome is not existing here at the moment so once we start the job running and it'll query the table see that um Chrome has been added and then dynamically update this query to include Chrome and then it goes out to Microsoft Configuration manager or seccm um to to to pull back the software meeting data for Chrome and um great so yeah then let's leave this open and we'll see what happens we'll see that actually change when we run the import job so I just opened up the Oh I thought I opened it up in a different tab one second here let me get that back all right so now I fixed up my windows sorry about that so now we're going to find the usage job here if I could type and we can take a look at that so this is the job we want to run right Amry that's right Sean yeah and just just to call out for the demo purposes this job runs monthly on the second day of the month and for the purpose of this demo we changed it to 30 to be today the 30th of May um but that's out of the box that'll be equal to two as opposed to 30 just that out yeah perfect all right so now we're going to hit execute now and run this jobs again you wouldn't normally do this execute now this is just so we can actually show you what happens so if I come back over to the the data source job we should see here that yeah the SQL statement has in fact been updated when that import schedule job ran and let's take a look and see if we can find Chrome oh there it is right there so perfect Chrome has been dynamically added to this SQL query because we added a Reclamation rule for Chrome so now any luck there'll be usage data in our seccm and system that we are can pull we pulled back into Sam usage table so we're going to go over to the workspace again come down to license operations come down and find our software usage and we're going to take a look for Chrome so let's take a look for Chrome maybe we should put contains Chrome just in case because we don't know and there we go we now have usage information uh in our system coming in from secm and just uh to show you guys that it is in fact data coming in from today we can just put our updated date on here so you guys can see when these records were updated um and there they are so the created you can see they are created by me today today is the 30th of May and we now have usage information coming in so now this can be used um by the um you know can now compare against the Reclamation rules and it can create removal candidates so that's pretty much how software usage data comes into seccm so thank you very much andry for that quick overview of how those secm jobs work yeah you're welcome Sean all right we'll talk to you soon thank you perfect okay so we're going to talk a little bit about how did all of this data get in here from all of these SAS subscriptions um so if we take a look at my instance here I've got quite a few SAS Integrations that are configured again this is my demo instance so we do have a lot of different SAS um Integrations configur and again some of those have usage information some of them do not so in order to get SAS usage information again you're going to need to create that direct integration or custom integration um to be able to pull that information back into the software usage table so again each one of these you'll want to take a look at the product documentation website and take a look at what they actually can do and whether they will be getting some uh usage information or not so we can take a look uh if we come back into software usage right we can know we know that all this this publisher information uh not all of it but um for Microsoft is likely coming from um the service sorry the integration with the 365 portal not all of it obviously there's going to be some coming in from secm if we had it configured um those kind of things but basically we can see here all of this different usage information is all coming from um the 365 integration so again not every every SAS integration is created equal um so not all of those Integrations will be bringing uh information back in so you can see that really based off of all of those integration profiles I have really only have uh four of them that are actually bringing in usage information again this is demo data so uh I don't necessarily have all of that in there and some of this could have been created manually I know this techsmith was one of the ones we did in part of the bulk update demo and same with the Autodesk so really only the Adobe and Microsoft usage data is coming into my demo environment right now so that's just one way to review through is again SAS based integration usage dat is dependent on the publisher and whether they actually have that as part of their API so in today's video we reviewed what soup software usage is why software usage is important how software usage data gets imported uh I demonstrated how to manually create software usage records and we reviewed the CM usage import process for more information on software usage you can go to the service now product documentation site um a couple of good articles is view or create software usage in workspace and there's also a good section on agent client collector hope you found this video helpful talk to you soon