[BESAdmin-Announcements] IBM BigFix Inventory and IBM License Metric Tool application update 9.2.4 available

[Announcements for BES Administrators]

IBM BigFix Inventory and IBM License Metric Tool application update 9.2.4 
is now available.
This update contains key features that increase our capability to help 
customers reduce software costs, manage compliance, and mitigate security 
risks.
Below is a set of key features common for both products with information 
about the value that they add:
License metric thresholds for IBM products
The IBM PVU Subcapacity and All IBM Metrics reports were enhanced to allow 
adding a threshold for PVUs or RVUs per product. These values can indicate 
the upper limit of license metrics about which a company wants to be 
informed when they are exceeded as well as internal charge back or 
allocations. They can also represent the maximum number of license 
entitlements available on Passport Advantage.
When these values are set, BigFix Inventory and License Metric Tool 
automatically compare them to the gathered PVU and RVU MAPC utilization 
and provide delta counting.
Additionally, a new Exceeded Thresholds predefined report was added to 
provide a list of products that exceeded the threshold limit. Coupled with 
the email notification capability, it is now possible to get immediate 
attention to non-compliance situations. 

Benefit: Customers are now able to better manage their IBM compliance, 
avoid overdeploying products for which they do not have enough 
entitlements as well as identify IBM products that are highly 
underdeployed to look for cost reduction or optimization. 

New Software Classification panel (preview feature)
This is the first delivery of preview features. A preview feature is a new 
capability, fully supported and certified, that can be optionally enabled 
in the product. It is enhanced in stages and made available to get 
customer feedback and recommendations for its further development. 
The new Software Classification panel provides advanced sorting and 
filtering capabilities. It also supports predefined and custom reports 
that aim to simplify the task of classifying products (bundles, suites and 
more) in a well-structured and effective way.
Initially limited to IBM products, the report will be expanding to non-IBM 
products. Over time, it will also consolidate the Software Installations 
report.
A new date filter First Detected was added to this report to provide 
information about when a given product or component was first discovered. 
It allows filtering criteria for analytics or forensics in software 
security or software compliance analysis.
 
Benefit: Customers can experiment with this new flexible and effective way 
of analyzing IBM products (as for this release) and get improved 
visibility of what type of IBM software bundles are applicable to their 
environment. They can also easily update and modify them, thus reducing 
the operational and administrative costs as well as improving compliance 
visibility. 

Enhanced discovery via ISO/IEC 19770-2 software ID tags
Effectiveness of software discovery based on ISO 19770-2 was enhanced to 
automatically augment the software catalog with products that are 
discovered via software ID tags but are not available in the software 
catalog. Thanks to the support for software ID tags, software is not only 
discovered and displayed on the reports. Its definition is also 
automatically added to the BigFix Inventory catalog even if it was not 
available.
Benefit: Customers are now relieved from adding software signatures to the 
software catalog to discover and manage software. They can rely on best 
practices and packaging processes that could add ISO/IEC 19770-2 software 
ID tags to their deployed products for proper identification and 
recognition. The ISO/IEC 19770-2 tags can also grant trusted source of 
information about the deployed software. 
All new versions/releases of  IBM products are now delivered with ISO/IEC 
19770-2 software ID tags. Therefore, IBM software will be discovered and 
properly identified even if its definition is not available in the version 
of the IBM software catalog that is currently used.

Hardware Inventory report enhanced with cluster information
For x86 virtualizations (i.e. VMware and Hyper-V) where servers might have 
been configured into a cluster, the Hardware Inventory report was enhanced 
to show the cluster identification data for the discovered hosts and VMs 
that belong to it.

Benefit: This information helps customers to properly register and manage 
assets. It also allows BigFix Inventory to properly gather and visualize 
the associated cluster information on the software reports to enable 
proper licensing and compliance for products that use per cluster 
licensing metrics (i.e.: licensing per cluster or per node that belongs to 
a cluster). 

Instant feedback sharing
To improve Q&A communication and feedback to the BigFix Inventory and 
License Metric Tool web user interface, a Send Feedback button was added 
to the top-right corner of the application user interface.
Benefit:  If you encounter problems with panels and reports or you think 
that some of them could be improved, you can quickly share your feedback 
by simply clicking the Send Feedback button that is available in the 
top-right corner of the application user interface. 

Action to take:
To learn how to get the application update and deploy it as well as to 
view the full list of new features and APARs that were fixed in this 
application update, see the following links:
BigFix Inventory: http://ibm.biz/bfi_update_924
License Metric Tool: http://ibm.biz/lmt_update_924

Questions
If you have any product-related questions, please post them on one of the 
following fora:
http://ibm.biz/BFI_Forum
http://ibm.biz/ILMT_Forum

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