Learning about the product catalog

The Product Catalog includes names and definitions of software products, hardware products, and services available to an organization. A CMDBadministrator can manage products by approval status, categorization, development status, and other attributes. 

Product Catalog components

The following figure shows the components of the Product Catalog.

The following table describes the components of product catalog:

You must specify the model or version, and patch number for each product catalog entry. For software products, you can also set a market version in the product catalog entry. The software license management engine in Remedy Asset Management uses the Market Version to determine whether that product catalog entry has a related software license contract. For information about market version, see Managing software licenses in your organization using normalization. 

The product catalog holds normalized values of attributes for a given hardware or software product. It enables you to categorize a Configuration Item (CI) to a granular level with manufacturer and model names, and the three-tiered set of categorization attributes, namely Category, Type, Item (CTI). These attributes are applied to CIs during normalization so that all instances of a given product have the same values. When a CI matches the product name and the manufacturer of a product catalog entry, it receives values from that product catalog entry for the categorization attributes. 

Approved products in the DML and DHL

When you install Product Catalog, the Definitive Media Library (DML) and Definitive Hardware Library (DHL) are initially empty. To populate these libraries with product entries, the CMDBadministrator must approve the products in the product catalog. 
You can approve products in the product catalog in the Company and Module Relationships area of the PCT: Product Catalog Setup form. For more information about approving products, see Approving and managing products, versions, and patches in the Product Catalog. 

The Definitive Media Library (DML) is a repository for all approved software products in an organization. The DML contains the metadata of master product copies and includes not just software metadata but also the metadata of other types of media, such as databases and files. Configuration items (CIs) that are stored in BMC CMDB can include software, release packages, patches, system images, and other such details. 

The Definitive Hardware Library (DHL) is a repository for all approved hardware products in an organization. You can approve hardware products and define their storage location in the product catalog. 

You can search for products in the DML or DHL from the product catalog console by selecting them in the Product Catalog View as shown in the following figure.

Product Catalog status

You can use the product catalog status options to manage the products in your organization. You can set these options at the product, version, and patch levels. When you set the status options for a product, the associated versions and patch entries also have their options set implicitly. 

For more information, see Product Catalog status options.

Product Catalog and multitenancy

The product catalog enables you to define approved products for different companies. Multitenancy enables you to have a single product catalog shared among multiple companies. You can track the approved products for each company from the same product catalog. For each company, you can define the approved items for the product, version, and patch levels. You can also define other attributes, such as Managed, Blacklisted, Mark for Deletion, Hidden, Life Cycle, and Status for products in the product catalog.

For more information, see Product Catalog and multitenancy.