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.

Related Topics

Computer-system-models

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:

Attribute	Usage
Name	Identifies the child instance in the context of the parent instance of the BMC_ComputerSystem class.
SystemName	Specifies the name of the computer instance. This must be the same as the parent instance of the BMC_ComputerSystemName attribute. This attribute is automatically populated from the related CI when a weak relationship is created between the computer system and the product or patch.

Additional attributes for BMC_ComputerSystem for products or patches

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

Attribute	Description
Description	The description of the component.
ManufacturerName	The company that manufactured the component.
SerialNumber	The serial number of the component.
ShortDescription	A description for the component.
PatchNumber	The version number of the patch.
VersionNumber	The version number of the component.