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Inventory Software

  • 10 February 2023
  • 18 replies
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PatrickMurphy
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How do you utilize the Inventory Software system?

We pull data from intune to get software sync.

Playing with it today I found a few issues:

  1. When I retire an asset any software on that asset still shows in the software inventory. I’d like a way to remove all software associated to an asset. I’ve not found a way to do other than manually going through 500+ software listings, looking for the asset and removing it. I do see that when looking at an asset it will tell me all the software listed but no way to remove all software. Am I missing something or how have you accomplished this?
  2. How do you utilize the Discovered, In Review, Managed, Ignore, Restricted categories.
    1. Discovered - obviously new things that are scanned show here
    2. I review the discovered assets and if it is an OS (MS) Driver (Dell) Printer (any manufacturer) I move to ignore.
    3. If it is a licensed product or something managed by an MSP or the business like a saas application I move to Managed
    4. If it is software that I dont think is business related or depreciated software I move to Restricted
    5. Outside of my personal categorization of the software above, there is no processes or workflows to alert on a new restricted software.
  3. For software that is depreciated I’ve found now way to search for software with 0 installs. I manually look at all software and if 0 installs I just delete the software as there is no history of assets or users that may have had that software at one time.  Once no assets are assigned to the software is there really any reason to keep the software?

What are your thoughts and usage?

18 replies

G
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We are just starting down this path, and interested to read the responses here

afautley
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Hi Patrick
1st point.
i’ve just started using software via the freshservice discovery agent. Only rolled out to our tech team at the moment whilst we figure out processes. But i can see where you are coming from, unless you delete that asset it is not going to have the software removed, but you do not want to delete the asset you just want to mark it as retired. (same as us).

The only other way i can think of getting round this is to re-image the machine before retiring so that it only appears on your core software. 

However, this is not right and needs addressing, Maybe creating as Idea as a feature request here would be a start, i will also take this up with my CSM as if we can get the ball moving on it hopefully it is something they can implement. 
Maybe something like a button to clear software on the asset. (then it will self update again when the discovery agent runs again.)

If you want me to put idea in i can just let me know. 

afautley
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2nd point, 
Discovered - Obvious
In review - I move everything from discovered into review so that i have a consistent list of software i am reviewing at any one time, then if the agent discovers new software then it will appear in discovered, not in the list of software i am reviewing… i think this is a really great feature… From review i move them into one of the next four categories. 
Managed - anything that is current and in our estate that we which to keep track of 

Ignored - We move anything into here that is current in our estate but we do not wish to keep track of.

Disabled - We move anything into here that is old versions of software, products we do not use anymore(Retired). Anything in here we will actively contact the customers to remove or remove via automation.

Restricted - We move anything here that we classify as a security risk and should be removed straight away… I have not found a way yet to send emails or flag of any restricted software installed. This currently is a manual check once a week.

I would love to be able to create custom buckets here so that we can change the names to things like retired software etc..

afautley
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3rd point.
I do the exact same thing. Anything that has 0 installs in managed or disabled I delete the software, if it finds this software again through discovery then it will re-appear in discovered queue which i find more beneficial. And no i have not found a way to sort or search on this at all, very frustrating. 

I do not delete out of ignored as i wish to ignore this software and forget about it. also we do not remove software from restricted bucket as we wish to know when software appears in this bucket so we can action. Ideally from the workflow Automator, i create an incident every time a software is found in the restricted bucket..

PatrickMurphy
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@afautley just an FYI we had personal devices get added through an enrollment issue into Intune.  Those assets that were deleted, still show up in the software lists that need to be manually removed.  These are what started this conversation for me because they are no longer assets I want to know anything about so they were deleted and since they were personal devices they brought in loads of new software with an install of 1.

So deleting the asset, actually doesn’t remove them from the software inventory lists.  Which is why I thought I was missing something as far as wanting to remove all software from one asset or in software be able to search and remove one asset.

afautley
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@PatrickMurphy Ah i see. 

Agreed what would be good is if they had an option to sort it all by installs then you could fin the 0 installs easily. then also have an option to highlight multiples and delete. at the moment i think i have to delete when opening up the software directly.

Medic1334
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@PatrickMurphy late here but…. you can setup an asset automator that will remove all associated software when the trigger is met. I’m not sure when this was rolled out.  For us, we setup the event “Asset state is change from any to retired” then the action “Remove associated software installation”. Maybe @afautley made this happen :)

Cheers!
PatrickMurphy
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@Medic1334 but is that for all discovered software from the agent or does that only just remove assigned software to the device?

Medic1334
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It only removes software installations from the scoped device.

 

We “went nuclear” on our complete software library to remove all entries (we had about 4K) and the support team was able to do a bulk delete within 24 hours of the request being made by me. When the discovery agents checked back in, the software on them was repopulated.

 

Cheers!
Medic1334
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Here’s an example workflow


And here’s my device (we have another automator that appends -retired to the name when a device is moved to retired)

This will also show in the activity log. Here’s an example from the same box: 

 

Cheers!
michaelmartel
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Here’s an example workflow


And here’s my device (we have another automator that appends -retired to the name when a device is moved to retired)

This will also show in the activity log. Here’s an example from the same box: 

 

I’m not seeing Asset State as an option. Am I missing something? 

 

michaelmartel
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I also don’t see Remove associated software associations.

michaelmartel
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I figured this out. I had to set the Asset Type as Hardware.

Medic1334
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I figured this out. I had to set the Asset Type as Hardware.

Yup! Gotta use hardware or any child CI to get the option to appear. I had computer as the asset type since it’s irrelevant on network infrastructure etc.

Cheers!
afautley
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@WongAmy FYI might help

zachary.king
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Our team is getting our feet wet in Asset and Software management in Freshservice. Finding threads like this are super beneficial. I wish I had something to contribute, but I greatly appreciate all of you for continuing to share your pain points and solutions. Can always count on these individuals when I am struggling with something that is Freshservice related.

- Zach / ITSM Solutions Engineer
G
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Our team is getting our feet wet in Asset and Software management in Freshservice. Finding threads like this are super beneficial. I wish I had something to contribute, but I greatly appreciate all of you for continuing to share your pain points and solutions. Can always count on these individuals when I am struggling with something that is Freshservice related.

+1 on this, thanks everyone for your contributions!

C
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Just logged in to ask a question about Software management and stumbled across this thread which is related.

Thanks to @afautley for explaining how they use the software buckets, that’s a big help as a starting point as they’re not massively intuitive, even with the tooltips.

Our first issue is that nearly all the software has been added via the Discovery Agent installed on PCs. This reckons it's found 788 distinct bits of software which is ridiculous, but consider it’s generated the following entries for AutoCAD alone:

AutoCAD 2018
AutoCAD 2018 - English
AutoCAD 2019
AutoCAD 2019 - English
AutoCAD 2021
AutoCAD 2021 - English
AutoCAD 2022
AutoCAD 2022 - English
AutoCAD 2023 - English
AutoCAD 2023 Shared
AutoCAD LT 2018 - English
AutoCAD LT 2019 - English
AutoCAD LT 2021 - English
AutoCAD LT 2022 - English
AutoCAD Open in Desktop
Autodesk AutoCAD 2018 - English
Autodesk AutoCAD 2019 - English
Autodesk AutoCAD 2021 - English
Autodesk AutoCAD 2022 - English
Autodesk AutoCAD 2023 - English
Autodesk AutoCAD LT 2019 - English
Autodesk AutoCAD LT 2021 - English
Autodesk AutoCAD LT 2022 - English

I get that it’s just pulling info from the Windows client, but clearly this isn’t a manageable situation when it’s the same story across many other bits of software too. How are we supposed to manage this - is there any automated intelligence that can be applied or would it have to be a completely manual process to try to collate information (associated user/devices) across multiple devices?

 

Second question is the ‘Users’ field. Is this another completely manual one where you associate a user with software manually, then remove them when they stop using it? Again is there any intelligence to link ‘user last logged onto desktop’ and ‘software installed on desktop’ to soft software by user automatically?

 

Ta!

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