Managing PowerShell Connections

As a top tier cloud service provider, AWS provides a range of instances that you may subscribe to. The PowerShell connector for AWS EC2 (known as the AWS EC2 connector) connects to standard APIs provided by AWS, extracting data on all current instances and (where the instance is a virtual machine) their hosts. After the data is uploaded to the central application server, gathered information is displayed in the Cloud Service Provider Inventory page. In addition, IT Asset Management automatically creates separate inventory device records for any hosts identified by AWS. If you collect additional inventory from the reported instances (for example, if you have Inventory Agent included in the images used to spin up your instances, or you import additional inventory details collected with a third-party tool), the inventory device record for that software and hardware inventory import is matched to the instance data imported from AWS. Matching is based on the instance ID where that is available, and otherwise on the MAC address. When this match is successful, the Cloud Service Provider Inventory page provides a direct link to each related inventory device record.

Tip:If a future import from AWS shows that an instance has been terminated, or that a host is no longer available, any linked inventory device records are automatically removed, so that they can have no further impact on your license consumption calculations. Depending on the last known state, instances may still be visible in the Cloud Service Provider Inventory page at this time.

Microsoft Office 365 is a set of office tools available online (through a cloud-based subscription) and offline (installed locally). To import the users, licenses, and usage information from the Microsoft Office online account, an inventory beacon requires an inventory connection for Office 365. When created and configured successfully, this connector downloads all this information from the Office 365 online service account and uploads it to IT Asset Management for compliance calculations. For more information on creating an Office 365 connection, Creating Connections to Microsoft Office 365. For more about Office 365 support, see the System Reference.

There are two kinds of data exchange between ServiceNow and IT Asset Management:

While ServiceNow can return complete inventory from many different kinds of environments, it is currently not strong in discovery of (or, as we would say, collecting inventory from) partitioning technologies that provide virtualization on several UNIX-like platforms. If you are supporting these platforms, best practice is to install the Inventory Agent locally on them, reporting directly to your inventory beacon(s). This allows collection of all details needed for your license consumption calculations. This additional information integrates smoothly with the information collected from ServiceNow. In this case, it is best practice to set your Flexera inventory source as your primary source, so that the hardware information it gathers takes precedence over all other inventory sources (including ServiceNow).