Understanding the data that is collected

Although we’re not going to talk here about how data is collected using auditing agents, we will talk a little bit about the data that they collect and how this is stored in your inventory. In particular, we’ll discuss those portions of the data that relate to software licensing and usage so that you know what you’re doing when trying to model the licenses that you own and analyze how that relates to what you have installed.

Essentially there are four separate types of information that are stored in your inventory which are relevant here:

Computers are relevant because these can have software installed on them.

Software products are obviously important because these are what you are installing and licensing. However, software products don’t really exist. This is more of an umbrella concept that links together software assets and software installations (or the machines that licenses are installed on).

For each software product that you have recorded in your inventory, you can record multiple software assets. These software assets can be software licenses, media or software contracts.

We’ll talk more about this later, and in particular about software license assets, which describe the way in which you can install and use software products.

Finally, software installations are the individual instances/installations of the software products that you own and manage on the network. These are important because these typically indicate the use or requirement of a software license for a particular product.

Each software installation in your inventory essentially records a relationship between a computer and a software product. Typically individual software products will be installed on multiple machines – so as with software assets, you will typically have multiple software installations in your inventory for each individual software product. However, there will only ever be one record of the software product itself.

The most important thing that you need to understand here is the difference between software products and software installations. Essentially, each software product in your inventory is a record of a particular piece of software for which you hold assets (such as licenses and media) and/or for which you have installations on the networks. The software product itself is simply an umbrella to link the other bits of information together – to help you identify which licenses go with which installations.

So, any given software product that you own/use will usually only be recorded once in your inventory (as a product in the Software Licensing section of your inventory). However, you can record multiple software assets that are related to that product and the auditing agents will no doubt pick up multiple software installations (instances) of that product on the various PCs that you manage on the network.