Gathering FlexNet Inventory

IT Asset Management (Cloud)

Optimizing your software licenses requires that you can balance your purchased license entitlements against consumption of those entitlements. Consumption is calculated by examining hardware and software inventory — details about your computing devices as well as the applications installed (or used) on them.

Inventory can be brought into IT Asset Management in four main ways:

• Inventory collected by third-party tools can be imported through adapters that normalize the data for use in IT Asset Management. There are several adapters supplied as standard (for example, see IT Asset Management Inventory Adapters and Connectors Reference), and it is also possible to build custom adapters to import data from other third-party tools (see The Inventory Adapter Studio in the same document).
• Some systems provide APIs that IT Asset Management can interrogate for inventory information.
• IT Asset Management also has a "native" ability to collect general-purpose inventory information, collectively called "FlexNet inventory" to distinguish it from inventory gathered through the other sources.
• In the specialized Kubernetes environment, IT Asset Management supports two independent, specialized agent for collecting inventory from Kubernetes environments. There is also a special tool to use "static analysis" (that is, to complete the process without interfering with any product containers) collecting software inventory from container images.

This document covers the various agents that are available for IT Asset Management, known as the FlexNet Inventory Agent (covered in Part 1), and the Flexera Kubernetes inventory agent and Lightweight Kubernetes inventory agent (covered in Part 2). The specialized script called imgtrack, built to run against the images that can instantiate containers and analyse the software that is available in the resulting containers, is covered in part 3.