Inconsistent discovery of installed software
Two discovery providers can discover the same product, such as Microsoft SQL Server 2008 on two different servers. Each discovery provider may provide different values for the BMC_Product Model, Manufacturer, and Version attribute fields due to differences in the way in which they acquire this information. For example:
- One provider may return Microsoft SQL Server 2008.
- Another provider may return Microsoft(R) SQL Server 2008.
Having this type of inconsistent data in CMDB could lead to incorrect licensing counts and other reporting issues.
The important BMC_Product CI attribute values that require consistent values across all the CIs in CMDB, and which need to be reconciled are:
- Name
- Model
- ManufacturerName
- MarketVersion
- VersionNumber
Upgraded software
Upgrading a piece of software to a newer version on a computer can be modeled by updating the version for the existing CI, which is done automatically by CMDB.
Uninstalled software
Software that has been uninstalled from a computer is modeled by marking the CI as deleted (rather than hard deleting it). The CI for the uninstalled software that is marked as deleted so that information attached to that CI (incidents, licence information, and so on) is retained.