Software discovery in docker containers

ImIronMan asked a question.

July 22, 2019 at 5:33 AM

Hello,

At our customer estate, containerization is growing quickly but they feel FNMS not picking up the applications installed/evidences installed, below are customer's observations, need your advice

1. Flexera has never picked up any commercial components relating to Weblogic, indeed confirmed with Oracle that they’re not licensable but are components of a licensed Weblogic Server.

2. JBoss EAP is not being pickedup

3. Not pickingup Oracle DB as well

Would it be as simple as someone putting a product (e.g. Oracle DB) into a docker container for Flexera to not pick it up? If this is the case then we have bigger issues

Regards

Rajesh Ponnala

FlexNet Manager Suite On-Premises

Top Rated Answers

0_tbesse (Flexera Software)
7 years ago
Good morning,
Discovery within containers requires a completely different approach compared to collecting information from a full OS layer (which containers don't have). We are however aware of the importance of collecting inventory and are planning to support this in the first half of 2020:
Discovery of container hosts and instances on premises and on cloud
Inventory software installed on containers in a agent-less manner
Report hardware and software inventory in FNMS for compliance

Hope this helps,
Thorsten

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All Answers

mfranz
7 years ago
Hi Jajesh,
To my knowledge, FNMS does currently not support any containerization technology. Before actually collecting data, there are some questions to be answered. Things like:
What is the actual license metric for each of these containerized applications?
What data needs to be collected (accessing user, accessing machine, host cores, virtual cores, etc.)?
What are the publisher's takes on containerization? (I guess most of them have nothing official in that direction yet.
This gets pretty complex quickly and a general solution isn't found easily. If you have ideas, I would be glad to read about them here.
Regarding your last comment: Hiding software from an inventory tool was always easy, if you knew how the inventory solution worked. But that's not how SAM works.
Best regards,
Markward
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- 0_tbesse (Flexera Software)
  7 years ago
  Good morning,
  Discovery within containers requires a completely different approach compared to collecting information from a full OS layer (which containers don't have). We are however aware of the importance of collecting inventory and are planning to support this in the first half of 2020:
  Discovery of container hosts and instances on premises and on cloud
  Inventory software installed on containers in a agent-less manner
  Report hardware and software inventory in FNMS for compliance
  
  Hope this helps,
  Thorsten
  
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  - sunil.s.menon
    7 years ago
    I understand that right now FNMS doesn't have capability to discover applications/softwares deployed on containers, but will FNMS at the first place discover that whether 'Docker' as an application or 'Kubernetes' as an application is installed on the server
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    JohnSorensenDK (Flexera Software)
    7 years ago
    @s_menon_2020
    It's one of these "it depends" type of answers... It would depend on how Docker/Kubernetes is installed, i.e. which footprint the installation has left on the device. There are some definitions in the ARL, so FNMS will potentially discover and recognize the installations of Docker/Kubernetes but it may also vary by operating system.
    Thanks,
    Expand Post
    ChrisG (Flexera Software)
    6 years ago
    For future reference for anybody looking at this thread, some support for discovering and gathering inventory from Docker containers on Linux has been added in the FlexNet Manager Suite 2020 R1 release. See the following post for more information: Discovery and Inventory of Docker Containers in Flexnet Manager Suite 2020 R1
    Expand Post
- ImIronMan
  7 years ago
  Thanks @mfranz for your response.
  The customer has quite a number of Oracle products with named user/proc metrics installed on docker containers.
  At the moment, I do not have much ideas around it because this is something completely new to me
  Regarding the "hiding software" thing, the statement was pasted from customer's mail. :) but I understand and agree with your comment :)
  Regards
  Rajesh Ponnala
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  - patryk.zwolinski
    7 years ago
    Isn't it so that Flexera recognizes software in containers as if it was installed on the host operating system? I'm wondering if once could go from that with some custom scripting.
    Expand Post
  - mfranz
    7 years ago
    Hi Rajesh,
    So what are the implications of these metrics?
    User/Named user
    
    I guess there is a chance that users are managed somewhere, maybe in an Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) or another IAM tool? Would this be an alternative source for the data? I am not too experiences with all the Oracle licensing details, but could a simplification be applied, like "if the user can access (as per OEM), it has to be licensed"? And from there just allocate users via business import to an Oracle Named user license?
    Processor metrics
    
    I think there are contracts allowing for virtual core licensing, but usually they refer to the host/datacenter hardware. So if you know which machines are used for containerization which applications, couldn't you just allocate them to an Oracle processor license?
    Best regards,
    Markward
    Expand Post

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