Inventory

IT Asset Management (Cloud)

The Inventory menu under Discovery & Inventory contains features related to the inventory of devices in your network. IT Asset Management collects the following information about devices present in your computing estate:

• Hardware inventory information including serial number, the number of processors, MAC address and so on.
• Software inventory information including the name, version, and publisher of every application installed on a device. This information is collected for both physical and virtual machines.

Types of inventory data

IT Asset Management can collect inventory data from a variety of systems. This data can be collected through the installed FlexNet Inventory Agent, Zero-footprint inventory gathering, or one or more third-party adapters. You may need to purchase FlexNet Manager for Datacenters to collect inventory from specific systems, such as to collect VMware inventory. You may have to configure Password Manager on the appropriate inventory beacon to collect some inventory data (see Using Password Manager When Collecting Specialized Inventory).

Inventory type	Required configuration	Description	Purpose
General hardware and software inventory	Gather hardware and software inventory from all target devicesoption in the action definition. See Creating an Action	When this option is selected, IT Asset Management collects inventory from the following systems: Windows UNIX/Linux/AIX OSX Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machine inventory.	Provides the general hardware and software inventory details of an inventory device that is within the specified target. This also includes the inventory of virtual machines (all supported VMs).
VMware infrastructure	Discover VMware infrastructure and Gather VMware infrastructure inventory, with advanced recognition of VMware applications options in the action definition. The inventory beacon should be configured to collect data from the VMware servers.	When the appropriate inventory beacon is configured, IT Asset Management collects the cluster, pool, and host information, in addition to the virtual machine inventory for VMware infrastructure. For more details, see VMware Device and Infrastructure Inventory. Note: The FlexNet Manager for Datacenters product is required to generate the license compliance position for VMware infrastructure.	The cluster hierarchy information is useful in calculating the license position for applications from some specific software vendors. For example, a publisher may require you to buy an application license for the whole cluster if the application is installed on a virtual machine that is dynamically moved between the hosts of a vMotion cluster.
Oracle VM infrastructure	Discover Oracle VM infrastructure and Gather Oracle VM infrastructure inventory options in the action definition. The inventory beacon should be configured to collect data from Oracle VM Manager and Oracle VM servers.	When the appropriate inventory beacon is configured, IT Asset Management collects the inventory of all Oracle VMs that are managed by the Oracle VM Manager. For more information on Oracle VM inventory, see Oracle VM Device and Infrastructure Inventory.	The cluster hierarchy and certain processor properties (such as CPU affinity) are required to calculate the license position for certain Oracle licenses.
Citrix Virtual Desktops (previously XenDesktop) Environments	Discover Citrix XenDesktop environments and Gather Citrix XenDesktop environment inventory options in the action definition. The inventory beacon should be configured to collect data from Citrix XenDesktop server.	When configured correctly, IT Asset Management collects VDI template, group, and group membership information. It also collects information about the virtual machines that have been cloned from each VDI template. For more information, see Citrix XenDesktop Device Inventory and Virtual Desktop Templates.
Microsoft Hyper-V infrastructure	Discover Microsoft Hyper-V and Gather Microsoft Hyper-V hardware and software inventory options in the action definition.	The inventory collection component (ndtrack) automatically collects Microsoft Hyper-V cluster and pool infrastructure inventory when collecting hardware and software inventory of the Hyper-V hosts discovered through the target (see Targets). The virtual hierarchy, including the virtual machine records are displayed on the Virtual Devices and Clusters page (you can filter by VM type = HyperV).

You can use the inventory pages to perform the day to day inventory-related tasks, including the following:

• Investigating why inventory is found but not managed as an asset
• Resolving issues with inventory records
• Choosing which old inventory records should be ignored
• Linking inventory device records to asset records
• Looking at the active inventory to ensure that there are no records that should be ignored
• Identifying retired assets with an active inventory by checking the Last Inventory Date column.