November 2022
Flexera One introduced the following new features and enhancements this month.
IT Asset Management
IT Asset Management added the following new features and enhancements in November 2022.
Changes to supported operating systems and compatibility with other products
This enhancement is available with IT Asset Management.
The following operating system version has been added to the list of supported operating systems on FlexNet inventory agent:
- macOS 13
The following product versions have been added to the compatibility list of IT Asset Management with other products:
- Citrix Virtual Apps server (previously XenApp server) 7.2206
- Citrix Virtual Desktops (previously Citrix XenDesktop) 7.2206
- EdgeSight for Citrix Virtual Apps (previously XenApp EdgeSight) 7.2206
- Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (previously Microsoft SCCM or SMS) 2207
For the full lists, see Prerequisite Software and Compatibility with Other Products in System Requirements and Compatibility.
Imported Google Compute Engine devices recognized as virtual machines
This enhancement is available with IT Asset Management.
Prior to this release, all devices imported from Google Compute Engine were recognized as Computer in the Inventory device type drop down list in the Inventory Device Properties page.
With this enhancement, devices imported from Google Compute Engine, are now recognized as Virtual Machine(s).
Enhancements made to Microsoft Windows Server Optimization reports
This enhancement is available with IT Asset Management.
The Microsoft Windows Server Optimization and Microsoft Windows Server Optimization Flat View reports now include the possibility to use the new “Per VM” licensing for Windows Server Standard implemented in October 2022 by Microsoft for customers with Software Assurance. For more details, see Microsoft Windows Server Optimization Report and Microsoft Windows Server Optimization Flat View Report.
The Optimum Virtualized Architecture for Oracle Options report now computes the financial savings allowed between the current architecture and the recommended architecture for Oracle Database Enterprise and Oracle Options. For more details, see Optimum Virtualized Architecture for Oracle Options Report.
The Oracle Consumption Summary by Partitioning Rule and the Oracle Partitioning Rule Impacts reports have been extended to include a new angle - Partitioning applied taking into account the VMs affinity rules. Both of these reports make a “what if” analysis on soft partitioning. For more details, see Oracle Consumption Summary by Partitioning Rule Report and Oracle Partitioning Rule Impacts Report.
New columns available in reporting objects
This enhancement is available with IT Asset Management.
To make reporting easier and extend the data exposed through the ReportsExecute REST API for Cloud customers, the following 16 columns have been added to the report builder in the Inventory Device, Virtual Machine, Cluster, Installation, Contracts, and Purchase reporting objects.
These new columns bring new attributes or numerical values for dates, which enables users to create new reports such as “All contracts that will end within 90 days”.
| Reporting Object | New Column |
|---|---|
| Cluster | vCenter IP Address Note: This information is provided by the Flexera vCenter Inventory. |
| Contract | End Date (days) |
| Installation | Installation Date (as reported by the add/remove program evidence when available) Start of Life Release Date End of Support End of Support (days) End of Extended Support End of Life |
| Inventory Device | Server (Based on the operating system, the value can be yes or no) Inventory Date (days) Primary Inventory Date Primary Inventory Date (days) Primary Inventory Source |
| Purchase | Expiry Date (days) |
| Virtual Machine | Affinity Enabled |
Citrix Cloud adapter for collecting non-persistent VDI data
This feature is available with IT Asset Management.
Following the VMware Horizon adapter released in May 2022, IT Asset Management's non-persistent VDI adapter capabilities have been expanded with the addition of the Citrix Cloud adapter. Similar to the VMware Horizon adapter, the new Citrix Cloud adapter allows you to collect non-persistent VDI data from Citrix Cloud and import it into IT Asset Management.
Collected VDI data consists of:
- Existing VDI devices and templates
- Existing delivery groups where these VDI devices and templates are installed
- What user groups have access to these delivery groups
Imported VDI data and application evidence collected by the FlexNet inventory agent will give you full IT visibility of inventory running on the Citrix Cloud platform, and provide licensing capabilities for all applications used by end-users on non-persistent VDIs.
For more details, see Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Adapters in the Inventory Adapters and Connectors Reference.
Support for Kubernetes/OpenShift inventory running on Linux on IBM Z (z/VM, KVM) s390x
This feature is available with IT Asset Management.
The Flexera Kubernetes inventory agent now supports Kubernetes/OpenShift on Linux operating systems running on the IBM Z z/VM and KVM s390 architecture (also known as "System z", "zSystems", or "z/Architecture", which is a mainframe architecture developed and supported by IBM).
For more details, see Gathering FlexNet Inventory.
Intelligent license restriction
This feature is available with IT Asset Management.
The new Intelligent License Restriction feature, allows you to link licenses to Device Groups or User Groups to minimize the manual efforts of allocating devices to licenses.
IT Asset Management already has the ability to restrict licenses per entity, and for rare license types per OS type (server versus device). This existing functionality has been expanded upon to include Computer Groups and User Groups. For example, you can now link a report to a license to only allow inventory devices in that report to consume from that particular license.
Applying this restriction, empowers SAM managers to influence the scope of license coverage in a more automated way, and prevents spending large amounts of time manually allocating license consumptions.
For more details on Intelligent License Restriction, see the section “Link a report to a license to only allow inventory devices or users in that report to consume from that license” in Restrictions Tab.
Licenses Compliance and Unlicensed Product Risks report
This feature is available with IT Asset Management.
Before this release, users had to view the information about license consumptions and unlicensed installations from different reports, which sometimes made it complex to understand the full picture and to identify the license coverage gaps.
From this release, a new Licenses Compliance and Unlicensed Products Risks report is available which contains all license consumptions together with the unlicensed installations of commercial products. This report can help users to better understand their licenses compliance and to notice the “under the radar” installed commercial applications.
For more details, see Licenses Compliance and Unlicensed Products Risks Report.
Remote Usage for Streamed Commercial Applications report
This feature is available with IT Asset Management.
Before this release, it was not easy to size the risk on remote usage of per-device streamed applications.
When an application used through streaming (for example, Citrix or Microsoft RDS) is licensed by device (for example, Office Professional Plus), each device used to perform the remote access needs to be licensed. Having the precise data throughout a long period of time is not possible.
From this release, a new Remote Usage for Streamed Commercial Applications report is available to address this challenge. This new report sizes the risk by correlating, user by user, the usage on streaming servers (based on file usage) and the usage in the same 90-day period of the remote access applications.
For more details, see Remote Usage for Streamed Commercial Applications Report.
VMs Inventory Gaps from vCenters report
This feature is available with IT Asset Management.
The new VMs Inventory Gaps from vCenters report returns and displays all virtual machines (VMs) and corresponding inventory status from a vCenter import.
The report groups the inventoried VMs information (including their vCenter) with the awaiting inventory ones, providing an opportunity for SAM Managers to contact the operation team(s) and request the deployment of inventory agents for VMs that are yet to be inventoried.
The following information provided by the report is key to resolving the gaps in the VMs inventory:
- The vCenter inventory date is critical and allows you to see possible data collection issues or outdated information that may be responsible for not triggering an agent deployment request.
- Host information (host domain, host corporate unit and so on) will help to identify management team(s) for non-inventoried VMs.
For more details, see VMs Inventory Gaps from vCenters Report.
NLog has replaced Log4net for configuring logging levels in IT Asset Management
This enhancement is available with IT Asset Management.
From this release, the log4net assembly is no longer shipped with IT Asset Management, and has been replaced by NLog.
NLog is a logging platform that writes to several different targets (database, file, console) and allows users to change logging configuration on an ad hoc basis. For more information about NLog, visit the NLog website.
The NLog upgrade impacts the logs that are generated on the beacon only, and not the agent. No logging changes have been made to the agent. Customers do not need to perform any new actions concerning this upgrade. Logging configuration is still changed by means of the XML config files in the default location C:\ProgramData\Flexera Software\Compliance\Logging, and the log files themselves will look identical to log files generated from previous IT Asset Management releases.
An example of the upgraded beacon NLog configuration file:
<nlog xmlns="http://www.nlog-project.org/schemas/NLog.xsd" xsi:schemaLocation="NLog NLog.xsd"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
autoReload="true">
<extensions>
<add assembly="Flexera.Common.Logging"/>
</extensions>
<targets>
<target xsi:type="Console" name="console" layout="[${date:format=yyyy-MM-dd HH\:mm\:ss.fff}] [${level:padding=-5:fixedLength=true:uppercase=true}] ${message:exceptionSeparator=\r\n:withException=true}" />
<target xsi:type="File" name="file" maxArchiveFiles="1000" archiveNumbering="Date" filename="${gdc:item=ComplianceLoggingPath:whenEmpty=${baseDir}}/InventoryBeacon/inventorybeacon.log"
archiveEvery="Day" archiveDateFormat="yyyy-MM-dd" layout="${date:format=yyyy-MM-dd HH\:mm\:ss,fff} [${logger:padding=-22:fixedLength=true}] [${level:padding=-5:fixedLength=true:uppercase=true}] ${message:exceptionSeparator=\r\n:withException=true}" />
</targets>
<rules>
<logger name="*" minlevel="Info" writeTo="file" />
<logger name="*" minlevel="Info" writeTo="console" />
</rules>
</nlog>
In the new NLog configuration file, for customers who want to change the level value for the logging, they can now do so by configuring two different levels towards the end of the configuration file (<logger name="*" minlevel="Info" writeTo="file" /> and <logger name="*" minlevel="Info" writeTo="console" />). One level outputs to a file and the other logs to the console. The six levels remain the same as they were for log4net - FATAL, ERROR, WARN, INFO, DEBUG and TRACE.
For more information on how NLog works with IT Asset Management, see Configure logging levels with NLog.
For information on configuring NLog advanced settings, visit the Configuration options page on the NLog website.
SAM Hubs and the SAM Optimization Hub
This feature is available with IT Asset Management.
From this release, a series of different SAM Hubs will be available in IT Asset Management. A SAM Hub is a process driven dashboard that aggregates information related to a specific topic (such as Optimization, Operation and Transparency) and provides the following:
- KPI trends over time
- High level explanations
- Metric drill down capabilities
In each SAM Hub, you can drill down through your data by using the available widgets and snapshots. And for a deep dive, you can run detailed reports.
The SAM Optimization Hub is the first SAM Hub available in IT Asset Management. The SAM Optimization Hub provides analysis on achieved and potential license savings, aggregating the data from the various optimization reports explained in SAM Optimization Hub.
IT Asset Requests
IT Asset Requests added the following enhancements in November 2022.
IT Asset Requests ServiceNow integration now supports ServiceNow releases San Diego and Tokyo
This enhancement is available with IT Asset Requests.
IT Asset Requests integration with ServiceNow now supports the latest ServiceNow releases: San Diego and Tokyo.
IT Asset Requests integration with IT Asset Management now requires a Flexera One IAM refresh token
This enhancement is available with IT Asset Requests.
IT Asset Management is retiring the use of AGW and AGW tokens. As a result, to integrate IT Asset Requests with IT Asset Management, an administrator now needs to provide a Flexera One IAM refresh token. Steps to generate the refresh token are provided in the Generating Refresh Token section of the Flexera One Help.
The org from which refresh token is generated should have FNMS capabilities to connect to IT Asset Management.
SaaS Management
SaaS Management added the following enhancement in November 2022.
Token-based authentication for Jamf Pro
This enhancement is available with SaaS Management.
In December 2022, Jamf will discontinue support for Basic authentication in the Classic API. For enhanced security, Jamf now requires Bearer Token authentication for Jamf Pro’s Advanced Search API. The following details help you enable the more secure authentication method.
Actions required for New SaaS Management integrations with Jamf Pro
The following Jamf roles are required to authorize the Jamf Pro integration. The Jamf Pro integration instructions describe how to pull in your organization’s Jamf Pro users from the Jamf Pro application roster.
| Role | Description |
|---|---|
| Auditor | Grants Read All permissions to the APIs used in this integration |
| Administrator | Allows you to create a Jamf Pro Advanced Search ID |
Actions required for existing SaaS Management integrations with Jamf Pro
Due to Jamf now requiring the Bearer Token authentication method, you must reauthorize your organization’s SaaS Management integration with Jamf Pro.
Jamf Pro’s new Advanced Search API requires Administrator privileges to obtain the Advanced Search ID value from the Jamf portal. The Advanced Search ID value is now required to integrate Jamf Pro with SaaS Management and pull in your organization’s Jamf Pro users from the Jamf Pro application roster. For further details, refer to the Jamf Pro integration instructions.