New Features Added to IT Asset Management in October 2024

AamerSharif · ‎Oct 11, 2024

Flexera One IT Asset Management October 2024 update includes the following new features and updates.

Note: For detailed information on these new features and updates, see the What's New in Flexera One / October 2024.

New Features

Microsoft Azure adapter supports certificate-based authentication

In addition to supporting application key authentication, the Microsoft Azure adapter has been extended to now support certificate-based authentication.

Prior to this change, the Microsoft Azure adapter was limited to using service principals for connecting to Microsoft Azure. This limitation caused numerous issues such as a requirement to rotate service principal access keys when someone departed an organization, increased overhead in managing access keys, and security risk of keys being linked.

From this release, by way of certificate-based authentication, the Microsoft Azure adapter can use managed identities for Microsoft Azure resources as a more secure way for authentication. Managed identities for Azure resources provide Microsoft Azure services with an automatically managed identity in Azure Active Directory. This identity can be used to authenticate to any service that supports Microsoft Azure Active Directory authentication, without having credentials in the code.

Software discovery for Unix-like platforms using running process tracking

Great new feature, software discovery on Unix-like platforms was inefficient and imprecise, with traditional scans generating excessive irrelevant file evidence. This led to poor visibility, identifying only about 10% of installed software, and required manual identification as the only alternative.

In this release, a new approach to software discovery on Unix-like platforms has been introduced to tackle the inefficiencies of traditional scanning methods. This approach uses running process tracking to identify installed software on Unix-like platforms, building a cache to validate and report software paths, thereby reducing irrelevant data collection. This new feature significantly improves the accuracy and relevance of software identification.

New support for Podman inventory on Linux

Podman container technology has emerged as the industry standard for container management, replacing Docker on many servers, including those running Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The FlexNet Inventory Agent now supports inventory collection from Podman on Linux. This new feature ensures comprehensive inventory management and aligns with the industry shift towards Podman, particularly in environments like OpenShift where Podman serves as the underlying container runtime.

Note: Podman on Windows operating system support will follow in the future release.

View Terminated status for Microsoft Azure short-lived cloud instances

Microsoft Azure integration has been improved to automate short-lived instance/vm life cycle management. This will eliminate the manual effort and automatically manage instance life cycle management when those instances are not reported by Microsoft Azure integration within the reported subscription.

Flexera One ITAM API documentation has been upgraded to developer Flexera One API documentation

Flexera One ITAM API documentation has been upgraded to developer Flexera One API documentation, This provides more details documentation and also single location for Flexera One API documentation.

Changes from previous releases

For the full lists, see Prerequisite Software and Compatibility with Other Products in System Requirements and Compatibility.

We love to hear about your experiences, so let us know how things go with these updates by posting a comment here or in the Flexera One forum Of course, the friendly Flexera Support team is also always standing by to take your call.

Thanks for being a partner of Flexera on this journey.