Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) Scanning

IT Asset Management (Cloud)

Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) is a powerful and fully integrated set of business applications designed to help organizations streamline and automate a wide range of operations, from finance and supply chain management to human resources and customer relationship management. Its modular design allows businesses to customize deployments to meet specific needs while maintaining seamless functionality across components.

For verification purposes, Oracle requires that submitted reports include detailed documentation of the installation, configuration, and usage of EBS products. This includes component-level deployment details, feature utilization, and audit data collection settings. Providing accurate and thorough reporting is essential not only for compliance but also for optimizing licensing and aligning with Oracle’s audit standards.

IT Asset Management enables organizations to efficiently gather verified audit data using either locally installed agents or remote beacon based execution, and to validate licensing consumption through automated imports and compliance checks.

By following Oracle’s verification guidelines and leveraging advanced inventory tools, organizations can ensure transparent, auditable, and optimized management of their EBS environments.

Oracle EBS Audit Data Collection Overview

• Audit evidence for Oracle EBS is gathered through the Oracle Database collection, not via the dedicated EBS audit data collection process.
• The EBS audit data is exclusively used to generate the Oracle GLAS evidence archive, which can be exported as needed.
• Exporting this archive involves extracting multiple tables, which may lead to increased CPU and memory usage, depending on the volume of data.
• This audit feature is not routinely used and does not contribute to IT Asset Management evidence generation.
• You can easily enable the Oracle EBS audit data collection feature to support auditing when needed. Follow the steps below to authorize the collection of Oracle EBS inventory data.

The FlexNet Inventory Agent can collect the appropriate EBS inventory using either of the following methods:

• The FlexNet Inventory Agent installed locally on the device where the Oracle EBS is running
• The zero footprint inventory collection method, where the main part of the FlexNet Inventory Agent (ndtrack) is temporarily downloaded from a nearby inventory beacon, executed, and subsequently removed.

(You can learn more about methods of collecting FlexNet inventory in Gathering FlexNet Inventory.)

Tip: IT Asset Management is verified by Oracle for collection and reporting of inventory for Oracle EBS.

There are two separate controls that affect inventory collection for EBS:

1. The Enable collection of Oracle EBS audit data check box on this page authorizes the FlexNet Inventory Agent to collect the relevant EBS data for upload.
2. The Include Oracle E-Business Suite check box (on the Inventory tab of the IT Asset Management Settings General page) allows the uploaded data and files to be incorporated into the OracleGLASEvidence.zip archive, ready for submission when an audit is required. You may also control data obfuscation in the audit archive (see System Settings: Inventory Tab).

In normal operation, both the previously-mentioned check boxes should be selected, and left 'on' forever. However, it is possible that, while rolling out this functionality, you want to turn on the data collection now for testing and inspection; and only include the results in the audit archive when you have adequate agent coverage of the relevant servers, and have configured all the required licenses.

Tip: This data collection requires FlexNet Inventory Agent version 22.0.0 or later; and including the results for audit requires that you have downloaded InventorySettings.xml version 75 or later, which contains the updated Oracle GLAS scripts. The version number of the InventorySettings.xml file is included in its first line, and the file is updated as part of the regular download of the Application Recognition Library (ARL). Theoretically, you can also use FlexNet Inventory Agent version 21.0.0 and InventorySettings.xml version 73 or 74; however, it is not recommended due to potential performance issues. Earlier versions of the FlexNet Inventory Agent simply ignore the setting, and so may continue to be used in other environments where Oracle EBS is not in play.

To authorize collection of Oracle EBS inventory:

1. Ensure that the FlexNet Inventory Agent installed on the appropriate Oracle server(s) has been updated to version 22.0.0 or later. For zero footprint inventory collection, the simplest path is to upgrade the appropriate inventory beacon(s) to version 22.0.0 or later, as this also updates the embedded version of the FlexNet Inventory Agent.
2. Go to the Inventory Settings page (Data Collection > IT Asset Inventory Tasks > Inventory Settings).
3. Scroll down and ensure that the Oracle audit data scanning section of the page is expanded (if necessary, click the expansion button on the far right of the section heading).
4. Select the Enable collection of Oracle EBS audit data check box. This option is disabled by default.
5. Scroll to the bottom of the page, and click Save to commit your change.
6. Go to the Inventory tab on the IT Asset Management Settings General page (Administration > IT Asset Management Settings > General) and select the Include Oracle E-Business Suite check box.
7. Wait a day or two.
   This allows for the new setting to be distributed to each inventory beacon as a beacon policy update (by default, these updates are requested and delivered each morning); and thereafter each installed FlexNet Inventory Agent receives the new setting when it requests a device policy update from its preferred inventory beacon. Then there must be sufficient time for inventory collection and upload, followed by the nightly inventory import and license consumption calculations.

The audit archive is updated automatically each night as part of the inventory imports and license compliance calculations. The Oracle EBS audit data can be reviewed and verified in the generated archive.