Product Catalog overview

The Product Catalog is a Action Request System (AR System) application that includes several components to manage products for companies and organizations. It is a library of all the products available to an organization, defining each product and its attributes, such as name, manufacturer, version, and so on. The Product Catalog contains characteristics of products that enhance the accuracy of BMC Discovery products by uniquely identifying a package regardless of installed name or location.

Purpose of the Product Catalog

The main purpose of the Product Catalog is to enable you to manage the products in your organization:

By providing identifying characteristics of products
By providing a single name for each product and its versions
By providing data for normalization and discovery, including storage of product signatures
By recording whether a product is approved for use in your organization
By tracking and managing products by categorization, life cycle, development status, approval status, and other attributes
By managing products by companies and organizations (multitenancy)
By providing data for license management, compliance, and usage tracking

Entries in the Product Catalog

A Product Catalog entry is not a configuration item (CI) but specifies the normalized attributes for CIs. Thus, a CI is an instance of a product defined in the Product Catalog. For example, a dataset includes a BMC_Product CI named Microsoft Office Excel 2007. The Product Catalog has a product entry named Microsoft Office Excel 2007.

Each Product Catalog entry must be unique. A Product Catalog entry is considered unique based on the manufacturer name, product name, and product categorization tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3 values. These values correspond to the ManufacturerName, Model, Category, Type, and Item (CTI) attributes in a CI.

Components of the Product Catalog

The Definitive Media Library (DML) is a subset, or filter, of the Product Catalog that represents software products that are marked as approved for use in an organization. In previous releases of ITIL, the DML was called the Definitive Software Library.

The Definitive Hardware Library (DHL) is a subset, or filter, of the Product Catalog that represents hardware products that are marked as approved for use in an organization.

Categorizations in the Product Catalog and BMC Helix CMDB

Product categorization divides CIs into groups. Using the tiered structure of product categorization, you can create successively smaller, more tightly defined groups. You can create groups of CIs in Tier 1. In Tier 2, you can define smaller groups of each of those groups. In Tier 3, you can create even smaller groups within these groups.

For example, you might use Tier 1 to divide CIs into hardware and software groups. Within the hardware group, you might define Tier 2 groups for disk device, peripheral, processing unit, and virtual system. Within the processing unit group, you might define Tier 3 groups for desktop, laptop, mainframe, personal digital assistant, and server.

CIs in BMC Helix CMDB store Product Catalog categorizations in the Category (Tier 1), Type (Tier 2), and Item (Tier 3) attributes of the BMC_BaseElement CDM class.

Multitenancy and the Product Catalog

The Product Catalog supports defining approved products for different organizations. Multitenancy enables you to share a single Product Catalog among multiple organizations but track the approved products for each organization from the same Product Catalog data.