IT Asset Management Inventory Adapters and Connectors Reference (Cloud Edition)

IT Asset Management (Cloud)

IT Asset Management relies on software and hardware inventory collected from the computers in your computing estate to calculate what licenses are required. While the system includes a full inventory-gathering capacity, it also allows you to import inventory collected by other tools you may already have.

As well, the system uses a considerable amount of business-related data, including organizational structure, and records of purchases, to correctly track your existing license entitlements. This business data can also be imported from other sources in your enterprise. However, business-related data is not the subject of this document: instead, see Using FlexNet Business Adapters, which covers both the creation of business adapters and import of data through them.

This document, therefore, focuses on the collection of software and hardware inventory.

The data collected by the 'third party' tools usually needs to be rationalized in different ways, and mapped into the data fields within the IT Asset Management database. The interfaces that allow this mapping are called adapters, structured as XML files. On deploying a beacon, several of the adapters are downloaded by default and automatically available without any action from the user (for example SCCM, ILMT, BigFix, AWS, and Azure). The rest of the adapters are available for download from the Flexera Product and License Center as a zip file. You can also build custom adapters for inventory using the Inventory Adapter Studio, supplied with the product.

Some other inventory systems allow a rather simpler interface, where the preparation of XML-based adapters is not necessary. Instead, it is enough to declare a connection to these systems, most often from an inventory beacon. Some such systems are databases for third-party tools, where a direct connection may be possible, given a suitable connection string. The incoming data can then be mapped automatically into the operations databases for IT Asset Management, most often directly into the compliance database. Since the preparation of XML-based adapter files is not required in these cases, they are referred to simply as connectors.

This document gives priority to several of the standard adapters available for IT Asset Management, because these are the more complex cases that may require special installation, or custom XML files and the like. Over time, coverage of connectors will also increase.

Before diving into the details of the various connectors and adapters, some useful tables compare the kinds of information available from various data sources (see Inventory Comparison Matrix).

Following the details about available adapters and connectors, the Inventory Adapter Studio is documented. This is for advanced and experienced developers who wish to create custom adapters (see Inventory Adapter Studio).

Between these 'bookends', the following adapters and connectors are documented, in this (alphabetical) order:

IT Asset Management (Cloud)

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