BigFix Inventory Improvement ideas

Ideas
1

Hi all,

We recently spent some time with Inventory team to review a number of lapses within the functionality of BFI and logged a number of ideas to improve the product long-term. If you think any of them would be of benefit to you please vote. Thank you.

  • Add additional methodologies to detect Application Usage/Last Used statistics (BFINV-I-325)
  • Make Application Usage Statistics truly historical (BFINV-I-326)
  • Add Catalog signature support for Java product redistribution by big OS/Software vendors (BFINV-I-327)
  • Add ability to trigger catalog signatures “Enabled” & “Disabled” statuses, and impact on Catalog Signature Release management (BFINV-I-328)
  • Differential Signatures (BFINV-I-329)
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Add ability to trigger catalog signatures “Enabled” & “Disabled” statuses, and impact on Catalog Signature Release management (BFINV-I-328)

@ageorgiev Have you considered using the Software Classification Exclusion process to Suppress the components discovered by the “wrong” signatures, giving your custom signatures preference?

3

@itsmpro92, We have, the problem is that we have number of downstream integrations that use BFI data and adding ServiceNow potentially this year, and not all vendors are prudent enough to “comply” with suppressions on BFI side. What ends up happening we have to apply suppressions in every single system one-at-a-time for every single catalog item which is extremely tedious. Besides, all that data is still in the databases taking up space which depending on the number of discoveries can be substantial impact…

Besides, the bigger goal with this idea is to open the door for HCL to start offering “optional catalog signatures” (“disabled” by default but allow clients to “enable” of desired). I constantly have signatures worked out with HCL that are extremely useful but when ask “can this be included in the catalog?”, get “while this may be useful to you maybe not all clients would agree and we can’t cause impact to the others”… Something like this opens the door of not only bridging the management gap but offering optional discoveries.

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