Overview of Inventory Spreadsheets

FlexNet Manager Suite 2023 R1 (On-Premises)

You can upload inventory data from spreadsheet files to FlexNet Manager Suite in two ways:

• A one-off, one-time upload that you might need to do for workflow validation, demonstration or proof-of-concept purposes.

  The data will be saved on the application server and created as a unique connection. Once data from this connection is processed, the connection is disabled (and cannot be re-enabled). Inventory from this connection ages, and eventually appears in the Out-Of-Date Inventory list. To clear the stale data, delete the connection: everything imported (only) from that connection is then removed from the operations databases.

• Ongoing import of spreadsheet inventory data.
  To set up this workflow, you must use an inventory beacon. This workflow allows scheduled, repeated imports, and data updates, in just the same way as regular inventory imports from other (non-spreadsheet) data sources.

  Tip: Importing .xlsx files requires that you have installed a 32-bit version of Microsoft Access Database Engine on the inventory beacon that performs the import. (This requirement does not apply to .csv files.)
  Remember: The complete set of inventory data should be uploaded whenever updating the data previously imported from a pre-existing spreadsheet. That is, all original rows, along with the new rows of inventory data, get imported every time the data has to be updated. As with all other inventory imports, records that disappear from the source connection (in this case, your spreadsheets) are automatically removed from the operations databases to maintain synchronization with the data source.

If you need to collect inventory from a source to which FlexNet Manager Suite cannot directly connect (for example, a source inaccessible for security or any other reasons), you can export this software, hardware or virtualization data from your source into a comma-separated value (.csv) or Excel (.xlsx) file. This inventory spreadsheet acts as an intermediate file for data upload through an inventory beacon. For repeated use, you can use custom, in-house scripts to populate these spreadsheets with current data, saving them to your chosen upload folder. You can then schedule regular imports from your upload folder to keep the data current.

The following inventory types are supported:

• Computers and VMs
• CAL usage inventory, called access evidence
• Installation evidence
• File evidence
• Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) evidence
• Oracle evidence
• Virtual machine (VM) pool data
• Cluster evidence
• Cluster group data
• Cluster host affinity rule data
• File evidence and installer evidence for remote access (use these templates for lists of all users who can access a cloud-based service, or virtual desktops and applications).

Each type of inventory has a fixed file format, and you can access the corresponding inventory templates in either of two ways:

• You can download them from the web interface of FlexNet Manager Suite
• You can open them from an inventory beacon, where local copies are automatically synchronized with the central application server.

You can then populate your chosen templates with your inventory data, and import the completed files back into FlexNet Manager Suite.

Important: Within your spreadsheets, the number of columns, the column names, and the column order cannot be modified from those included in the template files supplied for each data type. Any such difference between the corresponding template and your spreadsheet results in an import failure. This also means that your spreadsheets must correspond with the current versions of the appropriate templates. From time to time, the templates are updated with additional columns or other changes to support new functionality. Updated templates are always distributed with the current release of FlexNet Manager Suite, matching the data import requirements for that release. The changes are announced in the Features by Release documentation for the corresponding release, as an alert that existing spreadsheets need to be upgraded to match the latest templates. If you upgrade FlexNet Manager Suite to a release including changed templates, and then attempt an inventory spreadsheet import based on an outdated template, the import fails. For example, for a mismatch in the expected number of columns, the error message looks similar to this:

Import failed. Error: Malformed spreadsheet file detected: Header row 
contains unexpected number of columns: xx. Expecting yy columns in file

Any such errors are displayed in the Last completed import section of the Inventory Data tab of the Data Inputs page (navigate to the system menu ( in the top right corner) and choose Data Inputs).