BigFix Inventory 9.2.4 is now available

IBM is pleased to announce that BigFix Inventory 9.2.4 is available.

This update contains key features that increase our capability to help customers reduce software costs, manage compliance, and mitigate security risks. Below is a set of key features common
with information about the value that they add:

  • License metric thresholds for IBM products

The IBM PVU Subcapacity and All IBM Metrics reports were enhanced to allow adding a threshold for PVUs or RVUs per product. These values can indicate the upper limit of license metrics about which a company wants to be informed when they are exceeded as well as internal charge back or allocations.

When these values are set, BigFix Inventory automatically compare them to the gathered PVU and RVU MAPC utilization and provide delta counting.

Additionally, a new Exceeded Thresholds predefined report was added to provide a list of products that exceeded the threshold limit. Coupled with the email notification capability, it is now possible to get immediate attention to non-compliance situations.

Benefit: Customers are now able to better manage their IBM compliance, avoid overdeploying products for which they do not have enough entitlements as well as identify IBM products that are highly underdeployed to look for cost reduction or optimization.

  • New Software Classification panel (preview feature)

This is the first delivery of preview features. A preview feature is a new capability, fully supported and certified,that can be optionally enabled in the product. It is enhanced in stages and made available to get customer feedback and recommendations for its further development.

The new Software Classification panel provides advanced sorting and filtering capabilities. It also supports predefined and custom reports that aim to simplify the task of classifying products (bundles, suites and more) in a well-structured and effective way.

Initially limited to IBM products, the report will be expanding to non-IBM products. Over time, it will also consolidate the Software Installations report.

A new date filter First Detected was added to this report to provide information about when a given product or component was first discovered. It allows filtering criteria for analytics or forensics in software security or software compliance analysis.

Benefit: Customers can experiment with this new flexible and effective way of analyzing IBM products (as for this release) and get improved visibility of what type of IBM software bundles are applicable to their environment. They can also easily update and modify them, thus reducing the operational and administrative costs as well as improving compliance visibility.

  • Enhanced discovery via ISO/IEC 19770-2 software ID tags

Effectiveness of software discovery based on ISO 19770-2 was enhanced to automatically augment the software catalog with products that are discovered via software ID tags but are not available in the software catalog. Thanks to the support for software ID tags, software is not only discovered and displayed on the reports. Its definition is also automatically added to the BigFix Inventory catalog even if it was not available.

Benefit: Customers are now relieved from adding software signatures to the software catalog to discover and manage software. They can rely on best practices and packaging processes that could add ISO/IEC 19770-2 software ID tags to their deployed products for proper identification and recognition. The ISO/IEC 19770-2 tags can also grant trusted source of information about the
deployed software.

All new versions/releases of IBM products are now delivered with ISO/IEC 19770-2 software ID tags. Therefore, IBM software will be discovered and properly identified even if its definition is not available in the version of the IBM software catalog that is currently used.

  • Hardware Inventory report enhanced with cluster information

For x86 virtualizations (i.e. VMware and Hyper-V) where servers might have been configured into a cluster, the Hardware Inventory report was enhanced to show the cluster identification data for the discovered hosts and VMs that belong to it.

Benefit: This information helps customers to properly register and manage assets. It also allows BigFix Inventory to properly gather and visualize the associated cluster information on the software reports to enable proper licensing and compliance for products that use per cluster licensing metrics (i.e.: licensing per cluster or per node that belongs to a cluster).

  • Instant feedback sharing

To improve Q&A communication and feedback to the BigFix Inventory and License Metric Tool web user interface, a Send Feedback button was added to the top-right corner of the application user interface.

Benefit: If you encounter problems with panels and reports or you think that some of them could be improved, you can quickly share your feedback by simply clicking the Send Feedback button that is available in the top-right corner of the application user interface.

Action to take
To learn how to get the application update and deploy it as well as to view the full list of new features and APARs that were fixed in this application update, see: http://ibm.biz/bfi_update_924

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