The role of the Product Catalog
The Normalization Engine uses the Product Catalog to provide a single name for each product and its versions. The Product Catalog provides data for normalization and also stores product signatures. Product Catalog entries are the definitive, or master, names and descriptions of software products and enable the effective management of software licenses in the production environment. Software titles are discovered by products such as BMC Atrium Discovery and BMC BladeLogic Client Automation Configuration Discovery Integration for CMDB. These discovered CIs are normalized by the Normalization Engine, which (after applying Version Rollup and alias rules) compares the CIs against the Product Catalog entries.
The BMC Atrium Product Catalog is a central repository of approved Product Dictionary (PD) entries and Software Library Items (SLIs). It includes a sample of approximately 4000 entries. SLIs reside in a list of URLs that link to the physical locations of all available software packages approved for distribution within your enterprise. The Product Catalog enables you to facilitate software license management and software deployment by adding or modifying PD entries and SLIs.
Remedy Asset Management refers to the Market Version of a product entry to determine whether that Product Catalog entry must have a related software license contract. This feature helps maintain certificates because instead of relating each minor version to the certificate, you can relate only the Market Version of the product to the certificate.
To normalize the MarketVersion attribute for CIs, you can manually specify the Market Version for a product entry in the Product Catalog or use Version Rollup rules in the Normalization Engine.
Important
- Each Product Catalog software entry can have accompanying version and patch information. However, you must set the Market Version for a Product Catalog entry if you plan to use the Remedy Asset Management product to manage software licenses in your production environment.
- BMC provides a Product Catalog Data Update, which can be uploaded to the CMBD and used as the base data. Additional data can be build using the Normalization process using discovered data. For more information about Product catalog data, see the Product Catalog Data documentation.
For more information about the Product Catalog and software license management, see
Product Catalog and Software License Management
.
For more information about Version Rollup rules and normalization, see
Normalization and software license management
.
Example
Calbro Services has the following Product Catalog entry for one of their applications:
- Product Name: Financial Advisor Pro
- Manufacturer: Calbro Services
- Model/Version: 1.0
- Tier 1: Software
- Tier 2: Software Application/System
- Tier 3: Financial/Resource Planning Application
But in their discovery dataset, the CIs have the following attribute values with no values for Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3:
- Product Name: Financial Advisor Pro
- ManufacturerName: CFS
- Model/Version: 1.0
The CIs fail to normalize, but Calbro Services notices that the ManufacturerName and Manufacturer values for the CI and Product Catalog entry do not match. The staff creates a Manufacturer alias where the Normalization Engine substitutes Calbro Services for CFS and then normalizes the CI using the matching product values.
Comments
"BMC provides a Product Catalog Data Update, which can be uploaded to the CMBD and used as the base data. Additional data can be build using the Normalization process using discovered data. For the latest version of the Product Catalog Data Update, see the Product Catalog Data documentation."
This probably should be removed. It looks like the last time Product Catalog data was shipped was 2013.
Hello Jason,
Thank you for your comment. I have changed the wording for the note. But, I have kept the link as it is for reference.
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Aditya
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