Asset count discrepancies between various reports

[atiensivu]

A recurring quirk that confuses customers, and myself, is the fact that asset counts do not match between various reports. 

As an example, if you take an asset export and compare it to an IaaS report, there could be a difference of 200+ entries. This assumes that the asset count matches the licensed asset count, 1 to 1. 

As long as performance metrics have been collected, you would expect the asset count to match the amount of entries in the IaaS report, excluding network devices and NFS devices.

Questions: 

#1: What could cause discrepancies as large as this to occur? 

#2: What determines an asset being shown in the IaaS report output? Currently licensed only? An asset that has performance data in general regardless of license?

Not trying to game the system, but many scenarios exist where assets that were originally licensed were determined to be out of scope and unlicensed accordingly to prevent recurring charges.

I've focused on two reports, but there are other reports that will display more or less asset counts compared to the asset export. I'm concentrating on these two for the moment. 

Thanks!

[mjamison]

Hi Aaron,

Regarding your first question; The Asset Report will list every device that responds to an ICMP ping. This can be anything from a cellular phone/tablet, to a printer, or even a time clock. Those devices wouldn't be included on the IaaS Cloud Pricing page.

The IaaS Cloud Pricing page will display display two listing for each device.

• Inventory—Compares the resources present and usable (provisioned) by the device against the various cloud instances, to provide a match on what is already present in the environment. However, many systems may not be utilizing the full potential of the hardware.

• Usage—Determines the instance type that is the best fit for the actual workload (performance) of the system, based on the data collected during the performance collection period of the assessment.

The Inventory data will be calculated when a device is properly discovered, so long as there is not an issue with data collection. The Usage data will be calculated once a device has been licensed for data collection, and that data collection successful.

Regarding your second question; For a device be listed on the IaaS Cloud Pricing page:

1.) The Calculate Cloud Pricing feature must be utilized.

2.) The device must be properly discovered (inventoried). This will provide "Inventory" data on the page.

3). After the device is licensed, successful data collection has occurred, this will provide "Usage" data. 

Hope this clarifies the difference in reporting.

Please let me know if there are questions.

Thank you,

Mark Jamison

Flexera Support Team

[atiensivu]

That makes sense for most scenarios, but unfortunately for this scenario, and others seen in the past, it doesn't fit with the behavior seen.

This typically happens with RHEL 5/6 servers, with identical packages installed, and the setup of the VM the same except for hostname.

That's the aspect that is extra puzzling. 

They have performance, networking and packaging information that populates correctly on servers that do show up in the IaaS report and the ones that do not.

Their licensing history matches too. I'm still digging into the minutia to see if there are differences in setup that I am missing.

Your explanation makes sense for those devices types you mention. I would expect those results.

Unfortunately, these are servers that really should be in the IaaS report. 

I can PM or e-mail the assessment involved if you can look into what we are seeing.

I have a list of approximately 200 servers that are in the asset list but that are missing from the IaaS report.