Welcome
Software inventory and license utilization
You can classify the discovered software so that reports in BigFix Inventory reflect your entitlements and properly show utilization of license metrics by particular products.
Contracts management
The contracts management group shows all contract-related reports in one place. This allows you to easily manage all your contracts.
Hands-on tutorial for contract management
Choosing the contract type

BigFix Documentation Homepage
BigFix 11 Inventory Documentation
Welcome to the BigFix Inventory documentation, where you can find information about how to install and configure BigFix Inventory. The application provides you with information about your inventory and license metrics. You can manage your software assets, gather information about your hardware, and ensure license compliance for your enterprise using BigFix Inventory.
BigFix Platform Documentation
BigFix Scanner (New)
Overview
Become familiar with key concepts that are necessary to understand how BigFix Inventory works and learn about features and functions that are introduced in every version of the application.
Installing
Learn about the requirements and available installation scenarios to ensure that the deployment of BigFix Inventory goes smoothly in your environment.
Configuring
After you install BigFix Inventory, configure the application. Create accounts for the users who need access to the application and set up scans to collect software and hardware inventory data from your environment.
Upgrading
A new version of BigFix Inventory is released periodically, typically at the end of each calendar quarter. Upgrade to the new version regularly to take full advantage of new features and application fixes.
Catalog Overview
This section provides information about catalog updates available with every release.
Managing the infrastructure
After you complete the initial configuration of BigFix Inventory, learn how to manage components of its infrastructure: VM managers, server, database, and data sources.
Software inventory and license utilization
You can classify the discovered software so that reports in BigFix Inventory reflect your entitlements and properly show utilization of license metrics by particular products.
- HCL BigFix SaaS Management Platform Integration
  BigFix Inventory can be integrated with HCL BigFix SaaS Management Platform. HCL BigFix SaaS Management Platform enables you to discover, manage, and optimize license spend on Software as a Service (SaaS) used in your organization. For more information on the HCL BigFix SaaS Management Platform, refer to https://www.hcl-software.com/bigfix/offerings/saas-management.
- Collecting Oracle Measurements Data
  Starting from version 10.0.15, BigFix Inventory extends its capability to collect Oracle Java SE measurements data. Since version 10.0.16, BigFix Inventory also collects Oracle Database options and measurements data.
- Vendor-specific predefined dashboard
  Vendor-specific predefined reports available in dashboard Inventory Reports provide software discovery and licensing information for specific software vendors of BigFix Inventory customers. These reports help Software Asset Managers manage software for their vendors and prepare for contract negotiations and license audits. To view the reports, click on a vendor in the vendor-specific dashboard. The dashboard is also called Inventory Reports.
- Reported license metrics
  BigFix Inventory reports utilization for a number of license metrics for IBM and non-IBM products. It also shows products that are assigned any BigFix metric even if calculating utilization is not yet supported for this metric. It gives you an overview of all IBM metrics for which you should have licenses.
- Software classification
  After new components are discovered, they are assigned to products based on bundling rules. If the initial assignment does not reflect your entitlements, work with the software inventory until it matches the entitlements. To make metric calculation accurate, assign each component to a product, exclude, or suppress the instances that should not be included in the calculation, and confirm your actions. After you confirm the actions, the classification is complete, and the metric calculation is accurate.
- Server Software Catalog
  To correctly identify components of software products in your infrastructure, ensure that your server software catalog is always up-to-date. Periodically import a new server software catalog that contains the most recent software products. Also, manually add products that are installed in your infrastructure but do not have corresponding entries in the catalog.
- Reports
  Reports provide detailed information about the computers in your infrastructure and the software items that are installed on these computers. By viewing the reports regularly, you can check whether actual installations reflect the software inventory information and ensure that the capacity values are assigned to products correctly. You can decide what type of information you want to display by choosing the appropriate type of report. You can also customize the type and amount of information that is displayed in a report and save the report settings to reuse them.
- Enterprise applications inventory
  Software components are discovered during software scans. The scans correlate data that is collected from the computers with the content of the software catalog, and thus determine whether a component is installed. However, software scans do not discover details of some enterprise applications, for example licensable options of Oracle Database or editions of Microsoft Exchange. The details are discovered by dedicated fixlets. If you are interested in discovering additional details of enterprise applications, run the dedicated fixlets apart from scheduling software scans. Otherwise, running the fixlets is not required.
- License metrics
  BigFix Inventory provides two types of information about license metrics utilization: aggregated utilization and raw utilization. The former shows utilization of the assigned license metric by all instances of a particular product within the reporting period. However, it is limited to a subset of license metrics. The latter shows data that is collected from .slmtag files. It shows raw utilization of all license metrics that can be used by a particular product. The data is not aggregated and requires further processing.
- Contracts management
  The contracts management group shows all contract-related reports in one place. This allows you to easily manage all your contracts.
  - Creating contract custom fields
    You can customize your contracts by creating custom fields that store your preferred information about the software licenses in your environment. Select an appropriate name for each custom field to reflect its purpose. After you create a custom field, it is available in the Create Contract pane, among other fields that are required to create a contract.
  - Using the Product Metrics per Contract panel
    Starting from version 10.0.11, the All Contracts panel provides an option to navigate to the Product Metrics per Contract panel.
  - Recalculating contracts
    From version 10.0.11, you can recalculate contracts using the Recalculate option in the All Contracts reports panel.
  - Migrating contracts
  - Importing contracts using CSV files
    BigFix Inventory allows you to import contract data through API and Web UI.
  - Exporting contracts
    This topic explains how to export selected contracts from interface. You can use this feature to save contract data in the format compatible with contract CSV import.
  - Hands-on tutorial for contract management
    - Definitions used in contracts operation
      This topic lists important definitions that are used in contract management.
    - Contracts overview
    - Contract features
      This topic describes the panels needed to manage contracts.
    - Considerations before creating a contract
    - Managing product and metric definitions in BigFix Inventory
    - Choosing the contract type
    - Assigning products to contracts
    - Assigning a contract to applicable computers
    - Managing contracts with metrics that are not calculated by BigFix Inventory
    - Managing products that are licensed to more than one metric
    - Changing default license usage reporting period
    - Using different license usage reporting periods
    - Managing purchase orders
    - Managing email notifications for contracts that passed through the threshold value
- Continuous Discovery Processing
  Continuous Discovery Processing is a systematic approach to identifying, analyzing, and integrating new information or insights into an ongoing workflow. This process ensures that organizations remain adaptive and responsive to changes in their environment, enabling them to make informed decisions and maintain a competitive edge. Stay effortlessly up-to-date and enjoy a more streamlined, hands-off experience.
- Software discovery in containers
  BigFix Inventory supports discovery of software in container images through standard discovery methods that includes catalog signatures, template signatures, installation registry and ISO SWID tags to cover traditional model of software deployment.
- Software data harvesting tool
Managing security threats
Learn how to use BigFix Inventory to manage security threats in your environment. You can view whether any of the installed components is prone to any Common Vulnerability and Exposure (CVE).
Tutorials
Tutorials help you understand how to use BigFix Inventory. They consist of modules that focus on broad goals. Modules consist of tasks that show how to configure specific settings step-by-step.
Security
Configure different security features to adequately protect business assets and resources in the data model when using BigFix Inventory.
Troubleshooting and support
Learn about solutions to common problems that might arise when you use BigFix Inventory BigFix Inventory and how to find logs and trace files that help you troubleshoot those problems.
Integrating with REST API
External systems integration is one of the key features of BigFix Inventory. Business logic is enabled for integration and interfaces are provided for common integration points.
Glossary
Guide in PDF format
DataFlow ServiceNow Integration
Service Graph Connector Integration

Choosing the contract type

You can manage contracts for a software product individually. This is useful if there are different agreements and purchase order with a software vendor for software licenses as well as support. If both software licenses and support have one agreement, and you do not want to manage them individually, you can create one contract that represents both software and support.

To choose contracts, follow the below path:

Reports > All Contracts > Edit > Add new contract

There are four types of contracts:

License—This is the default type of a contract. Select contract type as 'License' if the time period mentioned in the license and support agreements is the same; select contract type as 'License.'.
Support —Select the contract type as 'Support' if the time period mentioned in the license and support agreements is not the same. In such a case, create separate contracts for license and support.
Service—Select the contract type as 'Service' to manage contracts for purchased professional services if they have different periods or metrics for licenses and support.
Hardware—Select the contract type as 'Hardware' to manage your hardware contracts.
General (Known as 'Other' before version 11.0.4)—Select the contract type as 'General' to manage your general contracts.
Susbscription—Select the contract type as 'Subscription' to manage your subscription-based contracts.
SaaS—Select the contract type as 'SaaS' to manage your SaaS contracts.