Software inventory models

Software inventory represents products and patches that are installed on a computer. The BMC_Product class represents instances of installed products, whereas BMC_Patch represents instances of patches (operating system patches and product patches). You may not want to model patches in your BMC CMDB in all cases. For example, you might store patches for servers in BMC CMDB, but it might not be necessary to store patch related information for desktops and routers. 

Both BMC_Product and BMC_Patch are subclasses of BMC_Software and BMC_SystemComponent classes. You must associate each instance of a product or patch with the parent instance of the BMC_ComputerSystem class by using the BMC_HostedSystemComponents relationship. When modeling software inventory, note that the BMC_Product class captures only installed products or applications, and not runtime aspects. 
For more information about modeling run-time applications and using instances of BMC_Product for application modeling, see Software and application models.

Example of modeling software inventory with two products

The following figure shows an example model of a server with two installed products:

Example of modeling software inventory with one patch

The following figure shows an example model of a server with one installed patch:

Logical identity of BMC_ComputerSystem for products or patches

Like any child instance of BMC_ComputerSystem, a product or a patch is identified by the Name attribute in conjunction with the SystemNameattribute that represents the name of the computer system instance. Thus, the Name attribute represents the local name of the CI in the context of the computer that is hosting it, as described in the following table:

Additional attributes for BMC_ComputerSystem for products or patches

The following table describes attributes that provide additional information about products and patches: