Welcome
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.
Dashboards in BigFix Inventory
Dashboards in BigFix Inventory provide a comprehensive overview of your IT environment. They allow you to monitor and analyze data related to software usage, hardware inventory, and license compliance. By using these dashboards, you can gain insights into your organization's assets and make informed decisions to optimize resource utilization and ensure compliance with licensing agreements.
Reports Dashboard
The 'Reports Overview Dashboard' in BigFix Inventory provides a centralized view of key data insights, offering users an at-a-glance summary of inventory reports, software deployment status, and system health metrics. This dashboard helps streamline decision-making by displaying real-time analytics, trends, and performance indicators, making it easier to monitor and manage your organization's IT assets efficiently.

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
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.
- What's new in this release
  BigFix Inventory provides new features and enhancements that facilitate your work with the application. For more information, follow BigFix Forum - Inventory (Release Announcements).
- Features and functions
  BigFix Inventory provides useful features for managing physical and virtualized environments. It discovers the software that is installed in your infrastructure, helps you to analyze the consumption data, and allows you to generate reports.
- Preview features
  BigFix Inventory provides a set of preview features that give you a chance to take a sneak peek at what we are currently developing and researching. Whether it is a small function or an extended report, you can check how it works and tell us about your ideas. The previews can change with each release, which means that you can still influence their final form.
- Keeping BigFix Inventory up-to-date
  BigFix Inventory updates and content packs are released periodically. Ensure that you upgrade the BigFix Inventory server with each release to take advantage of the new features and apply the application patches.
- Dashboards in BigFix Inventory
  Dashboards in BigFix Inventory provide a comprehensive overview of your IT environment. They allow you to monitor and analyze data related to software usage, hardware inventory, and license compliance. By using these dashboards, you can gain insights into your organization's assets and make informed decisions to optimize resource utilization and ensure compliance with licensing agreements.
  - Inventory Dashboard (default dashboard)
    With version 11.0.4, BigFix Inventory brings a new 'Inventory Dashboard' which provides overall and breakdown data about your software database. The new dashboard is displayed by default if the preferred homepage is not set and you have the required permissions to view it.
  - Reports Dashboard
    The 'Reports Overview Dashboard' in BigFix Inventory provides a centralized view of key data insights, offering users an at-a-glance summary of inventory reports, software deployment status, and system health metrics. This dashboard helps streamline decision-making by displaying real-time analytics, trends, and performance indicators, making it easier to monitor and manage your organization's IT assets efficiently.
  - Health Check Dashboard
    The dashboard provides with a quick access to information about deployments, scans, computers, and software assets in your infrastructure.
  - Spend Overview Dashboard
    The Spend dashboard in BigFix Inventory provides a comprehensive view of software and hardware usage costs. It enables you to track and analyze software spend, optimize license utilization, and manage budget allocation effectively. The dashboard displays key financial metrics, such as license compliance, cost breakdowns, and trends, helping organizations make informed decisions about software investments.
  - License Optimizer
    The License Optimizer dashboard in BigFix Inventory delivers AI-powered pricing insights and essential tools to optimize licenses and reduce costs for a set of desktop applications. It enables you to track and analyze statistics of unused software and undeployed licenses to manage budget allocation effectively. The dashboard displays key financial metrics, such as comparison of contract spend to market price, potential savings, cost breakdowns, helping organizations make informed decisions about software allocation and license purchases.
- To Do list
  Available from 9.2.13. The To Do list provides you with information about items that might require your action including failed imports of data, availability of a new version of BigFix Inventory or the need to configure a connection to VM managers.
- Key concepts
  There are several concepts that will help you to understand how BigFix Inventory works and how to use it effectively.
- Business Scenarios
  To understand the business goals that you can achieve with BigFix Inventory, familiarize yourself with the main user scenarios. Each scenario presents a real-life example of using the application and lists personas who are typically involved in achieving a business goal.
- Limitations
  Review the list of BigFix Inventory limitations. For information on IBM limitations, refer to IBM limitations.
- <discontinued> Updates and patches for BigFix Inventory up to version 10.0.13.1
  This page provides information about application updates released for BigFix Inventory.
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.
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.
Tuning performance
Learn how to plan the infrastructure of BigFix Inventory and to configure the application server to achieve optimal performance. The following guidelines are applicable in big data environments as well as in smaller environments that are running on low-performance hardware.
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

Overview: Reports

The 'Reports Overview Dashboard' in BigFix Inventory provides a centralized view of key data insights, offering users an at-a-glance summary of inventory reports, software deployment status, and system health metrics. This dashboard helps streamline decision-making by displaying real-time analytics, trends, and performance indicators, making it easier to monitor and manage your organization's IT assets efficiently.

Accessing the Reports dashboard

To access the Reports Dashboard, navigate to the BigFix Inventory interface and select the Reports tab. From there, you can explore the available reports and customize them as needed.

Use Cases

The Reports Dashboard is useful for:

Tracking software usage and compliance.
Identifying underutilized resources.
Monitoring hardware and software inventory trends.

The reports are grouped to help you find all your related reports together. For more information about the reports, refer to Available reports. Use the search option to search your preferred reports. You can search with the file name, file hash, CVE name, and software component. To search your preferred files, use File Name or File Hash. Enter the software component name to discover the software. To search data about vulnerable software, use the CVE name. The default search filter is set to Discovered Software. 10.0.5 The quick search in the top right corner allows you to search contracts with the contract name. To learn more about the different types of predefined reports, refer to the Vendor-specific predefined dashboard and List of vendor-specific predefined reports. To view the complete list of reports, refer to Available reports.

A Refresh button is added to support cache mechanism in the the Reports dashboard. You can click the Refresh button to allow BigFix Inventory recalculate and reload the data.