ILMT/BigFix Inventory Demo 11/9/2018 March 2018 ILMT/BigFix Inventory Demo Boguslaw Nowak Malgorzata Jablonska Pawel Januszek BigFix Inventory/ILMT Development 2018-03-07

Agenda (ILMT and BigFix Inventory) Extended reporting capabilities for VPC license metric. Improved license planning and prevention of security risk by setting up and monitoring end of support dates for specific software. (BigFix Inventory) End of support date for IBM software components announced in IBM Lifecycle available out of the box. Extending the discovery of Windows applications by leveraging the aggregated package data. Quicker system recovery after a problematic import. Preventing accumulation of unprocessed data.

Hosted Beta Environment

Extended reporting capabilities for VPC license metric 11/9/2018 Part 1 Extended reporting capabilities for VPC license metric

11/9/2018 How Bernie, the Software Asset Manager, can get reports on Virtual Processor Core metric Bernie’s tasks: To mitigate the risk of incompliance, Bernie needs to review compliance position for products with the VPC license metric. He would prefer to have a dedicated report for VPC products because this would help him provide a proof of compliance to his boss. Solution: Bernie uses the audit snapshot for the VPC metric which is a new feature based on the aggregation of the VPC metric. The new audit snapshot is available from the All IBM Metrics report. To reduce the effort and have a dedicated view for VPC products, Bernie defines a custom report with a relevant filter. Every time he needs a VPC audit snapshot report, he simply opens the saved report.

11/9/2018 Part 2 Improved license planning and prevention of security risk by setting up and monitoring end of support dates for specific software

11/9/2018 How Bernie, the Software Asset Manager can manage end of support information, and how Norma, the Security Operation Center Manager, can benefit from it Bernie’s tasks: Bernie needs to prepare a report with the license demand for the next quarter. For this purpose, he checks end of support information for various software and vendors. Norma’s tasks: Norma analyses security data trends and plans preventive actions to reduce security risks for the organization. Out-of-support software is a risk – it does not have security patches for newly found vulnerabilities that would prevent potential attacks. Solution: Bernie works with the Software Components catalog to keep end of support information and update it as needed. He creates a report for the software with EOS in the near future and enables e-mail notifications. Norma runs this report and, armed with this data, prepares preventive actions more effectively.

11/9/2018 Part 3 End of support date for IBM software components announced in IBM Lifecycle available out of the box

11/9/2018 How Bernie, the Software Asset Manager, can quickly check end of support information for IBM software Bernie’s tasks: Bernie needs to prepare the license demand for IBM products. He goes to the IBM Lifecycle web site to confirm end of support information for each IBM software version deployed in his organization. He would like to optimize this time-consuming task. Solution: Bernie goes directly to the Software Components report to verify end of support dates. He filters the view to show IBM software of his interest and with EOS relevant to the period that covers the order.

11/9/2018 Part 4 Extending the discovery of Windows applications by leveraging the aggregated package data

11/9/2018 How Bernie, the Software Asset Manager, can easily extend the coverage of Windows application discovery by leveraging aggregated package data Bernie' tasks: Bernie reviews installed software inventory. He notices that some applications installed on Windows machines are not covered by the Software Catalog yet. However, they are visible in the detailed Package Data report. Bernie leverages the package data to create custom signatures. However, due to the number of installed software it is a time-consuming and far from optimal task. Solution: Bernie uses the new, aggregated report with Package Data summary that is calculated on demand. This report allows him to create custom signatures in a semi-automated way. He can also quickly check which software is already covered by the existing discovery signatures. .

Quicker system recovery after a problematic import. 11/9/2018 Part 5 Quicker system recovery after a problematic import. Preventing accumulation of unprocessed data.

11/9/2018 How Mark, the Infrastructure Administrator, can avoid long recovery time after unexpected problems with import Mark’s task: Mark needs to ensure all data collected from the infrastructure is delivered timely to the BigFix Inventory server. In rare, but unfortunate situations when data import process is failing, Mark needs to recover data freshness in the shortest possible time. Solution: Persisting issue with the import causes accumulation of unprocessed data in the BigFix server. This accumulation is needed to avoid loss of data. If it lasts for a longer period of time, it causes that, after the problem with the import is solved, all the buffered data has to be processed. This recovery process could take long time compared to the standard successful import. To avoid data accumulation on the BigFix server, Mark can contact the Support Team, and set the BigFix Inventory/ILMT parameter ‘enable_partial_imports’ to ‘Yes’. Thanks to this setting, subsequent imports process data from the BigFix server if the issue does not concern one of the crucial steps. Data consistency is preserved, but data freshness on the reports is not until the underlying root cause is fixed. Once the issue is eliminated (with or without product support help), the next successful import should not take much more time than any usual one.

Forum: BigFix Inventory | License Metric Tool 11/9/2018 Forum: BigFix Inventory | License Metric Tool Wiki: BigFix Inventory | License Metric Tool Beta Community Twitter: BigFix Inventory | License Metric Tool YouTube: BigFix Inventory | License Metric Tool