Recording and Presentation of the March Monthly SAM Best Practices Webinar (Managing unrecognized applications in ITAM) are available!

[nrousseau1]

The recording of the "Management of unrecognized applications" March SAM Best Practice Webinar is available here: https://youtu.be/TsC8AJRaGZY

Here are are the main sections:

• 00:00: Kick Off & Agenda
• 1:56: News
• 5:36: Pointers for the last session ("Windows Server Optimization and Exemption of Java embedded instances") material  and answers to questions
• 8:25: Managing unrecognized applications
  
  • 8:25: context
  • 16:20: How Recognition works (Raw evidences, ARL evidence with wild card, Recognized application)
  • 28:27: Various types of evidences, various level of interest
  • 34:14: Prioritization, systematic process
  • 44:19: Demo: extending the recognition (existing application, new created local application, "clever" evidence)
  • 55:51: How to prioritize: help of a custom SQL report: "Unrecognized Installer Evidences Analysis". Demo
  • 01:03: 25 Other useful reports (Gap analysis Reports, Application transparency report)
• 01:07:40: wrap up

The PowerPoint used during the presentation are attached to this post.

[dmathias]

Hi @nrousseau1,  I wish you had more time to go through working with file evidence, instead of just installer evidence.  In particular, your PowerPoint deck made reference to "Has interesting recognition rule (at least one, required, for" but there is no discussion of how to work with this rule.

I am concerned because frontline Flexera Support is starting to refuse to process file evidence when submitted in new cases.  Instead, they are pointing to the Community content and this discussion, which, frankly, provides insufficient guidance to practitioners how to manage and to create local applications.

Just because Flexera has deprioritized certain evidence does not mean that our customers are not interested in these Tier 3 applications being reported.

Thanks, and best,

David

[nrousseau1]

Hello  @dmathias ,

Thanks David for your comment and involvement in the Community.

File evidence recognition is tricky and frustrating. Sorry for the long but hopefully useful answer.

I try to be very clear in this training that in 99% of the cases, installer evidence are the one we need to recognize application... "installer evidence usage" is even provided on Windows operating systems. "This is a reasonable goal to have 0 unrecognized file evidences for Publishers in scope, but file evidence is a lost battle, files should be managed opportunistically when they are the only way to recognize applications (Java, some Tibco applications (we are currently working on this)) or the "unique" client file.

Our content team has suffered for years receiving batches of unrecognized file evidences (50K line export from the screen) with the short comment "please add to ARL".

Based on the Product Name, the files have been linked to the applications, 99% of the cases with "Not for recognition" rule.

Some interesting stats:

• 885K ARL file evidence records are linked to 49K applications. This ratio of 18 evidence per applications this is not “THE” client file that we collect but batches
• 24K ARL file evidence records (2% of ARL file evidence) are used for recognition for 11K applications
• 202K file evidence records are ignored

The content blog article https://community.flexera.com/t5/FlexNet-Manager-Content-Blog/Managing-requirement-for-File-Evidence/bc-p/246157#M472 states the file evidence will no longer be processed in batches from flat extracts because this is incredible time for no value and it decreases performance. We prefer spending one hour working with a custom to find the right files for 5 commercial applications of a Tier 2 vendor  than 5 full days “processing” 4000 files that will all be unqualified and lead to 0 recognition. From an excel export, Flexera does not know the context, the applications (customers have the application managers) and the clever investigation cannot happen.

Long story short, file evidence is about quality and not quantity… the process should be:

• I am working on a vendor that matters to my company
• I see gaps in recognition or usage of a desktop application because installer evidence don’t seem sufficient
• I find THE interesting executable (the one behind the “launch application” link)
• I share it to Flexera (providing the file name, file description, publisher, mapped application, reason why (useful for usage and/or recognition) that will link it to application and will expend to other known versions.

We are conscious that we are asking more efforts than just exporting to Excel and sending to Support but with this intelligent collaborative contributions of the most skilled SAM community in the world :), the recognition quality will augment exponentially.

Then, this training opens to an areas that we are going use more: Intelligent Recognition. If we can recognize version 1, 2 and 6 of an application, why would we have version 3, 4 and 5 unrecognized?

We have scripts that can do the job (the Unrecognized Installer Evidence Analysis report shows the data, I attach to the recording announcement a script that does the job on File evidence but is too slow to be a report) and a big exciting track we are starting is to shift recognition from “random tickets opened by customers” to “Extensions recommended by scripts one existing unrecognized evidence data”.

I hope it helps,

Nicolas

[dmathias]

Hi Nicolas,

I appreciate that the tasks you reference were a challenge for Flexera support, and probably of relatively low value in terms of the quality of data produced from file evidence.  I will echo the frustrations of working with this evidence type.  My experience shows that there is a lot of "ghost" data in "Unrecognized File Evidence" that is not even reflective of what is *currently* installed, but rather an indication of what *used to be* installed.  The creation of custom applications may be a waste of time in those situations.

Thank you, too, for acknowledging that circumstances at the customer/account level may still require these applications to be measured and managed.  In our case, for instance, there are numerous applications for engineering purposes.  Many of these are from smaller vendors.  Others may be freeware produced by educational consortia.  In any event, the customer wants to know about them.

My intent was to call out that you apparently ran out of time in your presentation to cover the entirety of your agenda.  I believe you may have intended to spend more time on file evidence best practices, and the recognition rules in particular.

Since I need to do this work, and do it well for our customer, I will go back to the Flexera training materials and see if these questions were covered there.

Best,

David