[IMPORTANT UPDATE: 9 December 2020] Great news - Our Flexera customer and partner community now have a direct opportunity to share ideas and participate in future feature planning. Learn more and add your ideas via the Ideas Portal moving forward. Please note if you have added an idea to this discussion, we will migrate the idea to the new portal and notify you once it's been done. Thank you to everyone for active participation!
You can help shape Flexera's future by sharing ideas for improving FlexNet Manager solutions. We know you work with this product, probably every day. Not only see how well it works now, but you also have ideas for making it better.
Your feedback is essential to informing product decisions and shaping how FlexNet Manager and other Flexera solutions will evolve. The Ideas board is gone. But, don’t worry. Ideas you submitted to the Idea board are not lost. And a new spot for collecting ideas will find a permanent place on the Flexera Community in June.
In the meantime, we still want to hear your suggestions.
The comments below this article are your spot to offer ideas. Flexera’s product team will regularly review the ideas you post. The product team primarily is watching for ideas that gain traction among members of the community. That’s why it’s important for you to both leave your ideas but also support other excellent product ideas you see.
How it works:
You’ll need to register with and log in to the community. Click “Sign In” in the upper right-hand corner. If you don’t have an account, create one by clicking “Let’s go!’ on the sign in page. Or log in if you already are registered.
Check if your suggestion already is posted in the comments below. If it is, click the thumbs up to give it a kudo. More likes will increase the visibility and help us prioritize.
Submit your idea for a product change, if it isn’t there.
One more thing: You don’t need to mention bug fixes or other issues that Flexera’s Support team could handle.
You can open a support case by clicking on “Get Support” drop-down menu at the top of the page if you have a maintenance plan.
Dashboard with possibility to filter on Enterprise groups
Now there is one general Dashboard.
It would like to see possibilities to filter it on Enterprise structure like location, corporate unit or costcenter to give for example a nice specific overview to the corporate unit it involves.
Of course als possibilities to save view in management index.
Hi, We have a large Financial Services company - an existing and long-standing FNMS customer, here in Australia that would like to see a Google Cloud PowerShell-based adapter, like the ones that currently connect to both Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure.
Add 120 and 180 day options to the event views; e.g., Hardware Assets | Events | Asset Lease Expiry. Or, alternatively, provide the ability to add these options ourselves with instructions for doing so.
Oracle needs lots of improvements. For starters, the Oracle Instances view should include the full path to each instance, where Cluster and Host information is shown in their own field. Similarly to what is shown in the Virtual Devices and Cluster view, but with each item existing in it's own field. For instance, path DBCLUSTER01/ESXi01/DBServer/Ora123 would display as:
Name Type
DBCLUSTER01 Cluster
ESXi01 Host
DBServer VM
Ora123 Instance
And when exported to Excel, each would be in it's own field/column rather than concatenated into one field/column as happens today when exporting from the Virtual Devices and Cluster view. For instance, Column A = Cluster, Column B = Host, Column C = VM, Column D = Instance.
This type of information is quite useful when analyzing the Oracle license consumption for the entire virtualized environment.
The options Installed and Used by each instance, currently listed in the Oracle Instance Properties view, should be visible. I understand this would mean multiple line items for each instance if enabled via the field chooser but they would allow the ability to see all Oracle information in a single view.
The Business Application and Licensed (Yes/No) fields currently listed in the Oracle Instance Properties view should also be visible.
As mentioned in the discussion here, please consider improving the agent functionality. If inside Windows standard functions are called to collect WMI data, it should be possible to also introduce a parameter for alternate namespaces.
For on prem installations, ARL/SKU/PURL issues, I have to look for logs in completely other places than the rest of the logs. And even then, the files do usually contain very limited details and I have to run the executables to see any specific errors. Improvements could be:
Incorporate the corresponding logs into the (ProgramData) logging folder structure
it would be nice to get a simple way to check which account has access to which tenant.
When you go to "All Accounts" in a tenant, you will see all accounts of all tenants. That is fine, but when you have more than 20 tenants it's not so easy to check it.
Every time when we start a user review, we must check every tenant separately. Perhaps you can add one more tab on "Accounts" like check "permission of an account" ?
how about showing in FlexNet Manager Web UI - Dashboard - in detail which PURL has been imported successfully and not only update the version number right after the first one has been imported successfully.
how about not only support SOAP WebServices in our Business Adapter Studio and Business Importer on our beacons, but also support REST and/or JSON WebServices interfaces for importing data into FNMS.
how about getting a create staging database script for at least every major on-premise release available here for downloading in our Customer Community?
When doing a bulk update from any window, other than All Inventory, do not refresh back to the All Inventory view;
Allow for additional columns in Unprocessed Views - particularly Location and Corporate Unit - expiry date would also be nice;
When deleting Corporate Units and Subnets, unless they are nested under a parent, you have to delete one at a time. How about adding a checkbox selection to the left, like there are with assets;
When joining an inventory record to an asset, how about automatically changing it's status to Installed. Otherwise you have to open the asset, change it to Installed, join it to the inventory record and then save;
Keep the vendor names consistent. We now have Adobe Systems and Adobe, so if we want to run a recon by Publisher, we cannot select both, so that's a problem;
Create the ability to run a report for new inventory added/removed for daily stats;
Create statuses for Purchases that make sense - like Returned;
Create statuses for Licenses that make sense - the only ones that work are Active and Retired;
Allow for manual User merging, if the rules do not automatically merge users where they should have;
Allow for targeted agent deployment through collections.
There has to be improvement in the data stored for reporting , even if it is only available via Cognos. FNMS is well behind competitors like SNOW, Service Now and License Dashboard in this space. -- It should be easy enough to study the competitors offerings and bring some fresh capabilities to FNMS BI.
I am aware that there are things planned for June 2020, but I am not aware of what is included.
For starters, I would like to see time based trend reporting. This is desperately needed for licenses, application installations, hardware changes etc.
how about synchronizing Flexera PLC Library Download with Downloading the latest Library version via direct links in real time, as there sometimes seems to be different versions (PLC very often does only contain the old version from one week before)
Here we can see, that there is an enhancement request also for this feature on an Inventory Beacon. That sounds good for a tenant with one beacon.
But for tenants in our multi-tenant environment with more than one inventory beacon, it would be nice to use the repliaction on the application server with a filter based on the TenantUID, e.g.
Then we don't need to check all master inventory beacon of a tenant and we will found only files of the selected tenant on the application server. Atm unfortunately we found files of all tenants on the application server.
We require a functionality, where the User Creation is logged. Who created a new user, when did he create it, IP address etc. Right now, the tool doesn't seem to have a log. This is critical from security purpose.
how about still having the FlexNet Manager Suite Release Notes available as a PDF download to be able to share with customers at least for on-premise implementations?
new topic: Replication of rules of all beacon servers.
We have a lot of rules and five beacon servers. On all beacon servers we can see all rules, but only one beacon will excute a rule.
E.g. Rule#01 until #05 should execute on beacon#01 Rule#06 until #08 should execute on beacon#02 No rules for beacon#03, beacon#04, beacon#05
All other beacons will give us a "Out-of-Scope" message. You can imagine how many unnecessary entires we have in the system tasks like these every day:
Devices discovered: 0 Devices skipped: 0 Devices inventoried: 0 Devices failed to be inventoried: 0
Is there a way to check if the rule is for a beacon server or not, before the rules will send to the beacon servers? Unfortunately atm the check will done after the repliaction of the rules to the beacon servers.
It would be nice to avoid these entries because also with the filter: 'Only show last run' and task type: 'Discovery and inventory rule' and expand all we have a long list of entires: 96 results returned.
how about telling all the people here providing such good ideas, how often members of Flexera Support & Engineering are reading and reviewing this posts and provide feedback about what's done and what's not?
To safe additional costsadopt full functionality of FNMS Application-Server, DB and Beacon, onto Linux Operating System. We are mainly using Linux-Servers as standard OS for our Infrastructure components. Main use-case is to safe additional costs, also to have an homogen Infrastructure, as well as to lower operational and administrativ efforts. Then we could spend more money on Flexera licenses. 😉
I'm looking for a more advanced restriction functionality on license containers, ex instead of only be able to restrict to enterprise groups, it would be nice to restrict on Inventory Device Type.
Ex When creating a license container for Java SE Desktop, it uses the same Application/"Binaries" on server, laptop and workstation and for Java SE Desktop I want to restrict license usage based on Laptop and Workstation.
I know we can built a business adapter for this, but an advanced restriction algorithm in GUI would be much easier instead of running several business adapters
A feature to notify a license manager or contract owner or responsible party about contracts which are subject for a review an active notification by sending an email to the responsible manager/s would be useful so the dashboard does not need to be monitored repeatedly.
Request flexera to Publish the list of all Enhancements which are raised by different customers and their current status so that no other customer will put additional efforts in raising the same enhancement request and all are aware of whats going on with already raised requests.
Work on a customizable dashboard is in entry level phase in FNMS 2020 R1 and is expected to be fully available in 2020 R2. In 2020 R1 you have got various options using Analytics and we would recommend looking at these and providing feedback in this area as it's these that will drive the management dashboard capabilities in future.
@winvarma we are working internally on making enhancements available in the community this year, more updates will follow in the coming months as we get closer to achieving this but it is definitely something we are working to make possible.
Capture the license keys especially in cases where multiple type of licensing models may be present for same product, so as to differentiate between them.
@tbesse you asked me previously what I would like to get out of an integration to AWS SM since you already have an AWS integration.
the AWS integration currently in FMNS only fetches instance data, and for technical information each customer needs to deploy the fnms agent.
several cloud teams do not like to deploy an agent that is built mostly for traditional deployments. So my proposal is to make it easier to atleast get basic technical inventory from AWS SM which is close resamble to MS SCCM. It’s possible to fetch an inventory xml file and then create an inventory adapter.
I think you already have this code built in another flexera product, whick I believe would be easy to transfer into fnms. It’s one of your cloud integration products that has the functionality, as I understood in a powerpoint I have got a couple of years ago
It also seams AWS SM fetches AWS RDS inventory as well, which fnms agent nor aws connector have the support of
@mag00_75 , thank you for the further clarification.
The current approach with the direct integration to AWS catches indeed the instance information and status while a separate process is required to capture the detailed software inventory of the instances. This could be through the Flexera agent or any other discovery tool.
I agree, in an environment in which you pay per load, you would want to avoid running an agent on an instance as much as possible. However, I feel this is currently unavoidable for many relevant SAM use cases for cloud hosted applications. The built-in tools such as AWS SM - although a promising looking approach - fall short supporting these use cases. I'm thinking Oracle Database introspection using the Oracle LMS scripts or the IBM sub-capacity management, both supported by our agent.
But make no mistake, we will closely monitor developments in this area and definitely explore options to go agentless as much as possible.
In the User details, the date the user last logged onto each device they have used (not the date the device was last inventoried or the date the user last logged in to any device) and the number of logons within the last #days (7, 14, 30, custom range).
The Nutanix Hypervisor (AHV) was mentioned already. But while AHV is like an ESXi, a single host, "Prism" is for Nutanix what would vCenter be for VMware. It is the central management instance, providing an API. We have created an adapter to collect inventory (host inventory & host-vm-relationship data), but it would be nice to see something officially supported by Flexera.
how about start providing a KB or some kind of documentation showing exactly the differences in functionality between Cloud and On-Prem for FlexNet Manager Suite to enable all customers to choose the best fitting option based on their uses cases.
how about offering an active directory group or even better nested group import into FlexNet Manager Suite licenses, as more and more companies are maintaining the allowed users for certain software application in dedicated active directory groups and want to visualize this information within the license consumption tab of those named user licenses in the FlexNet Manager Suite Web UI.
If we have a list of devcies that should be removed or any data we want to delete, that can be easily done via beacon buisness adapter. It should not be restricted to cretae,update or modify.
Enhanced Manual Mapper
As of now, it is not easy to find out the details of installation directories because it depends upon a user or a machine. Again, MAC is not supported either.
Modify the Default Dashboard
Every user is different and works according to his/her roles in FNMS. Same dashboard for all is not a good option. It should give options to see the cards which are important to them.
Multiple search option
There should be some filter like "One of from the list" to see what we need out of large numbers and then we can decide if we want want to delete those results or download that list.
Scheduling Reports
We are not able schedule reports
Admin Alerts
Admin should be able to receieve alerts if any business adapter or system tasks fail or somebody gets in FNMS as another admin.
Beacon Page Update
Beacon page should display if not receiving inventory instead of saying operating normally just because it is talking to Flexera servers. Beacon page should also give option to dwonlaod logs directly instead of taking remote.
a better import of the MS365 adapter. The Microsoft portal shows when a license expires, how it was purchased (e.g. volume or cloud solution provider) and, importantly, when it was purchased. Generally, the purchase information from the portal is not imported into FNMS. Means that there are no entries in the licenses under the Purchases tab, although they are available in the MS 365 portal.
Allow manual consumption of a concurrent user license type (on the 'Consumption' tab of a license), similar to how you can for "IBM Floating User" or "Custom metric" license types.
