Ever question why a software installation in FNMS is showing up?

[mrichardson]

Ever wonder why one of your devices is showing SQL Server Enterprise Edition (or Enterprise edition of some other application) when you were expecting Standard Edition?  Or have you found devices that should have the latest version of Word installed but it’s only showing the last one?

If you're on FNMS Cloud then open any Inventory device that has installations and you will now see…

This new Evidence tab contains all of the “raw” evidence that comes from devices

Some key fields to pay attention to:

Raw XXXX – these fields are the actual values from the data source, little merging or normalisation has occurred at this point.

Recognized application and Assigned application – these will mostly be the same application unless precedence rules or suites are involved; Assigned application is the application the evidence is assigned to in the local or Flexera ARL, the Recognized application is the application that will show as Installed in the Applications tab – see online help for details. 

If these are blank, it means the evidence has not been assigned to an application so this is something that needs submitting to our ARL team (this is especially useful with the WMI tab as there is no Unrecognized evidence view for WMI elsewhere in FNMS).

Inventory source and Inventory dates – check these fields to make sure that if unexpected evidence is showing up you can see if it’s an out of date source and which source that is.

By using a combination of the available fields, you can identify what type of evidence triggered an installation, what source it came from, when it was last updated and when an evidence isn’t assigned in the ARL.

If there are any additional scenarios we haven’t accounted for, please let us know!

[mrichardson]

Further to this, I'm please to announce that we have created hotfixes to add this functionality to On-Premises customers on 2019 R1, 2018 R2 and 2018 R1.

These are available on our Product and Licensing Center however for more details, please see the relevant hotfix pages:

2019 R1 - Look at "Update 2019R1-05" on Flexnet Manager Suite 2019 R1

2018 R2 - Look at "Update 2018R2-06" on Flexnet Manager Suite 2018 R2

2018 R1 - Look at "Update 2018R1-09" on Flexnet Manager Suite 2018 R1

There are also further improvements to this tab coming in FNMS 2019 R2, specifically the file path is included in the upcoming release.

If you are not sure how to use our Product and License Center, please see How to Access the Product and License Center 

[tschaus]

May I suggest news of these updates also be posted in the FlexNet Manager Release Blog.
Great feature!!!

[mrichardson]

Hi @tschaus,

I don't have permissions to do so but have asked for this to be done.

[MrPotato]

Hi, I'm just testing this on the test environment. Looks promising. What I'm missing though is an option to create a report via Report Builder that would start from the Installations or Inventory Device -> Installations and include the evidence trigger. Otherwise for bigger lists of software you it is time consuming to provide those details individually for each and every device.

[mrichardson]

Thanks for the feedback, we intentionally didn't add it to the reports as early tests showed that due to the amount of records it would bring back, particularly around file evidence; it would create a number of performance issues in particular on our cloud.

As a result, we're going down 2 approaches, first is adding an evidence tab to the inventory device and then down the line we'll add a Devices tab to the evidence record so you can see how many devices reported that evidence.

Would the addition of this second item help address your need?

[MrPotato]

@mrichardson, that's why I thought Flexera should deliver a report out of the box where by default they'd put a limitation on the end-user as to what it can generate. E.g. like it is with a ApplicationInstallationDetail where you need to choose a publisher and then precisely choose product names. To some extent that would limit the number of results, right? I'm just throwing ideas here, I don't know if it's a good approach or not.

Evidence tab in the application is a step in a good direction.

@ChrisG, I'm trying not to relay on custom reports due to the no-maintenance policy. Like in a case where they would cause unexpected issues. But I might give it a go in a test environment - thanks.

[mrichardson]

When I was scoping this feature, I did look at a report with a set filter however I found that there were different use cases to cater for when speaking to different customers e.g. some would want to limit by Computer and see all evidence for all reported applications, some wanted to limit by application and see all evidence for all computers that have that application installed.

Those were the most common scenarios but there were others, when I spoke to our architecture experts I was advised that implementing a report of that nature that allowed one or the other filter would be risky in the current architecture so the only other option would be not to have a mandatory filter which brings us back to the performance issues, particularly for cloud.

As we update the architecture, I plan to re-visit this in future to see if it's more doable but in the meantime the options are:

1. Custom report as Chris mentions for On-Premises customers.
2. Add a Devices tab to the evidence properties and views e.g. Unrecognized Evidence
3. Continue with only the Evidence tab on Inventory Device properties

If you or anyone else is interested in option 2 in particular, please reply on this thread so that I can gauge interest, alternatively, we are bringing out a new Ideation portal early next year which will be the perfect place to submit ideas for improving FNMS.

[MrPotato]

@mrichardson so hereby I express my interest in having feature no. 2

[INgrid]

I chime in with @MrPotato  and vote for option number 2. 

It would help us sorting out unrecognized evidence in particular. 

[kathy_allen]

@mrichardsonI'd like to see #2 as well

[mrichardson]

Thanks all,

As there seems to be a reasonable amount of interest in option 2, I've discussed with my dev team and we'll look at adding this to the cloud in January as it's only a small amount of work to do.

I'll provide an update once we've added it.

[Ralph_Crowley]

I'd also like to jump on the option #2 bandwagon as well

[mrichardson]

Following on from my previous commitment, how does this look:

Would be interested to get initial thoughts on this i.e. what fields would be useful, does this address the concerns raised earlier?

[kclausen]

@mrichardson - Having the User Name would be extremely helpful (Calculated User, Assigned User, etc.)

[INgrid]

@mrichardson Nice! 

User name (last logged on and/or calculated) would certainly be useful. 

Also - if at all possible - the date when this evidence was first discovered on the device. 

[mrichardson]

Hi all,

So far the feedback I've received both on here and in internal discussions (in no specific order) are:

1. Recognised application
2. Match count
3. Devices count on General tab (to help show difference between Match count and actual devices with installations)
4. Calculated user
5. Assigned user
6. Last logged on user
7. New tab on access evidence showing the users that evidence is associated with

Due to timescales we can't add any of these prior to 2019 R2.2 which is the next cloud monthly release but we will schedule these in afterwards.

If anyone has any thoughts on these or has further fields we could add, please reply on this post.

[lcfernandez]

Hi @mrichardson 

Is possible to launch a Query through SQL manager to report all Unrecognized  of a unique vendor ?, is an on premise installation (2019 R2),  if is possible

we don't want to generate more data in the database.

Regards

[kclausen]

@lcfernandez - You can do this today by going to the Unrecognized Evidence view and then apply a filter to the Publisher field.

[ChrisG]

@MrPotato - check out the following post (and other discussion in the same thread) which may help if you are using FlexNet Manager Suite On-premises and want to use the reporting interface to expose evidence details: Unrecognized Evidence Report

As @mrichardson noted, you do need to be very careful about data size. It is very easy to generate massive amounts of data in these types of reports, so proceed with care. If you are really needing to work with the massive amounts of data, the interactive reporting interface is probably not the right place to go.