all right good morning good afternoon and good evening everybody my name is victor paredes colonia i am part of our asset management outbound product management team and i'm very excited to bring with you another servicenow live event this time covering what we call the software license equation with an emphasis on microsoft workstation and server licensing we appreciate you taking the time to join us today and so before i do get started i do want to mention a few announcements the first of which some of the information is privileged and confidential so please bear that in mind secondly some of the information or answers to the questions that we get today may be forward-looking in nature a product is always moving product features are always being developed and things are subject to change so again please bear that in mind all right so a big welcome to everybody this is another one of our servicenow live events uh our way of being as completely committed and dedicated to your success helping all of our customers deploy adopt and achieve value faster with their investments in servicenow this session is about to getting a better understanding of the software license equation this is a very standard type of use case where customers are aiming at being compliant with their licensed positions so we'll dive in a little bit deeper with respect to that with an emphasis on microsoft and to do that i've brought on board uh individuals from our itam outbound unit to help us with the conversation so again my name is victor predes colonia and joining me is michael scudemiglio also part of the outbound product management team srinivas ramon jia is also part of our outbound excuse me part of our asset management team and he focuses primarily on software asset management srinivas thank you for making the time appreciate you thanks victor for having me thank you and i know you're out in india so again thank you for making the time i know it's relatively late no problem so for the so for the folks out there uh we're gonna talk about three main topics uh first and foremost setting up what we talk about with uh software license equation what does that mean it's all about compliance so we're gonna talk about what what that means in particular with entitlements your installations and your effective license position then we'll look at that use case and how it how it relates to microsoft doing some examples related to workstation and server licensing and at the end we'll close with some troubleshooting and helpful tips to help you get successful along the way as always please submit your questions and related feedback in the chat and qa form and we will be getting to all the questions today at the end of the session but bear in mind that when you are answering questions or delivering those questions that they are focused on the topics that we discussed today if you have any comments use it use the chat so you can share information with others so without further ado i want to get started with our first segment which is the software license compliance equation and you know i've i've spent a lot of time before working at servicenow conducting software license audits i worked for one of our big four consulting firms uh that that focused primarily on fortune 500 software vendors and what we were doing was auditing on their behalf and so a lot of times customers were found out of compliance and so what we want to do today is is help our customers understand what that compliance equation is so srinivas at a very high level could you explain what the software license equation is and what's the goal of a customer in so far as that yes victor you know when you look at sam the heart of sam is is the business outcome to remain compliant with software licenses so basically the question that we want to answer is how much do we own and do we have any licensing risk and how should we go ahead and mitigate that licensing risk so that's sam at a very high level now coming to this compliance equation now this equation is in in very simple terms a form to compare your entitlements with your software deployed so that the end result is effective license compliance position so that's great and so i'm seeing here that at the bottom there there are actions that you take right so if you have more licenses then you have installations that might be indicative of of something but at on the contrary if you have less licenses than when you have installed that's also indicative of something can you talk about those implications and what actions or what what customers should be doing in those situations yes sure you know when you are over licensed it could be actually a good thing it means that your team is growing and you probably need more more rights so that you know as as users are getting added to your environment you can cater for them it could also be an opportunity to reconsider your maintenance renewals so that in the in your next maintenance renewable with your publisher you can think about reducing the number of licenses so that uh based on your actual usage so that's about you know if you have um you know over licensed uh licenses but the problem is when you are under licensed because that represents an audit risk and uh here you know there are many options one is uh you know the customer could the organization could pay for true up which uh which we don't want or remove their unlicensed installs or even consider optimization such as uh you know offsetting the drop using uh by determining their low usage software so there are many options there in both cases yeah that makes sense and and so this is a very high level concept of the license equation but if we were to take take this concept and look at it from a sam product perspective how would that look like how do these how do these fit within our sam or sam engine if you will yes so first comes your inventory data and your purchases which is basically your entitlements that you have purchased so these are all your purchases that you have made with your particular vendor in this case microsoft then comes the raw inventory which is your discovered [Music] uh software data uh which includes uh servicenow discovery third-party discovery or even the uh api related discovery because you know you have got microsoft 365 which is like a sas solution and you could get your subscriptions to that next comes your content services which includes normalization with basically a standardized way of representing your discover data and there is a huge research team at servicenow which handles that content library so that whatever you get whatever is discovered in your environment is normalized correctly with all the necessary details like you know the end of support and of life etc then of course comes compliance because using what you have uh purchase with what you have deployed you need to find out the the elp or the enterprise license position and for that you know there are a number of licensing models so servicenow applies all those licensing models be per core per user etc so that you can get an exact license compliance position and once you have that exact license compliance position wherein you can determine uh whether you are compliant what drop costs you have etc then comes the the action mechanism which is also known as service now as remediation actions now these actions can be some things like you know you could remove your unlicensed software that could be one action you could purchase more rights that could be another action or the system automatically determines a low usage office which you can remove from your system and basically offset your true up cost so there are many actions that the system or the product automatically gives which helps reduce the enterprise software spend mitigate risk help you optimize and of course uh detect uh your sas spends and unknowns of questions that that's great for nevas i mean i like the way that this slide comes together because if i'm a customer oftentimes i always ask where do i start right and i think this this is a nice display of as a customer where i should start and that that really is with getting in my entitlements into proper form into sam and then also bringing in my software installations the magic behind sam is that you're able to normalize and use the content service to get everything in a working order so that you're not only able to create an effective license position but you're actually able to use that enriched data to do other other activities if you have more products in the platform right things that you could do with itom itbm itsm and etc so i think this is a great great way of showing where entitlements installations and the effective license positions sit in sam i'd like to move to the next segment and i want to focus a little bit more now on microsoft so this is the main the main main event i want to understand how does this all work for microsoft could you give an overview of of microsoft and how we support it today yeah microsoft is you know one of the leading publishers uh that are used by organizations you know you are you're having all your uh sas products like office 365 m365 dynamics 365. you have got your server softwares like windows server sql server etc and service now does a good job in determining the compliance position for all these different uh types of softwares be it client operating systems and applications which includes project visual server operating systems and applications like windows server sql system center and of course has solutions like microsoft 365 and android 365. we have got a very good uh coverage on this queues we can see that 192 k unique flavors of uh ppns or skus are there in our content library which helps you to normalize the data in the most uh standardized manner so that you can get your effective license compliance position correctly um we support a number of licensing models so you know if you see windows server has got the code with cal we support that sql server has got berko licensing we support that as well microsoft 365 has got user subscriptions we support that as well and not only that you know we support many advanced use cases you know because uh what we see from organizations right now is uh that you know compliance is very important but with compliance cost saving is another very important factor that organizations expect from sam solutions and so you know we we uh we take that into consideration we support uh cost optimizations and recommendations so that uh the organizations can save uh useful dollars for software's like windows server sequel office 365 uh we apply uh you know all those uh software assurance benefits automatically on the product for example license mobility and next version right so that the number of uh rights consumed are less we provide recommendations so that you could uh move to the cloud for instance and we support uh you know great features like mls imports etc so you know you can see that you know we support uh license compliance optimization and also complex uh use cases uh for server products and client products so that's great for you for microsoft yeah i i like that i mean i see that even in even in microsoft um this is a very common theme that we have with asset management is you always want to crawl walk and run or you want to do things in phases and increasingly complex uh use cases so this is nice to see that even within one vendor we support different levels of of expertise or levels of use cases and complexity so thanks for breaking that down for us train of us thank you let's do an example um of what it looks like to do workstation licensing so i'm going to paint a picture tell us tell a story what i like to do anytime i talk to customers is i really ask them what is the business outcome you're trying to drive at with sam so one example might be you know we want to remain compliant with our microsoft project licenses so that we're able to reduce our audit risk so that's a good that's a great business outcome okay that's the goal what do you do and and what do you try to achieve within sam itself so what's the tech side of things okay so as a sam admin you know i need to calculate the number of users that i have for microsoft project and then compare that to my license count so effectively i'm comparing entitlements to installations and if i do that properly what i'm able to present to the business is a deliverable and let's call that deliverable the effective license position because it's in that snapshot in time that i can show what the license position is and even call out any any opportunities for optimization so this is the story and i'd like to see from your perspective srinivas how would you address a situation like this within product sure victor um you know microsoft project is is a great example it's it's a project management product which is very popular in organizations and uh you know it's it uses the per device licensing model which is uh you know another one of the licensing uh metrics that the servicenow sam supports uh microsoft project is installed on user systems and what servicenow does are mainly two things you know first of all of course you know it is able to determine license compliance and also it is able to determine um uh the low usage uh project users so that you know uh uh when once the low usage producers are identified those license either can be uh you know reclaimed from those users or you know assigned to some other users so that the organizations can save cost and you know when you're determining license compliance it could be that you are non-compliant so servicenow provides remediation actions automatically out of the box such as you know removing unlicensed installs uh or purchasing rights or as i said you know reclaiming those low usage office so let's see that in action in the product uh so you know we would understand that in a better way so i'll share my screen real quick yeah please let me know when you can see that screen yes we see it now all right so this is our license workbench as you can see that you know we are on the microsoft uh card and you know we support as i said you know all these different softwares be sql project etc and because example is on project i am focusing on microsoft project here and within project you can see that we have all these different uh uh versions and editions so one of them is 2016. so assuming 2016 is the one on which a sam manager wants to understand the license compliance so the first first you know when you uh see it you see that it's non-compliant so as sam manager i'm intrigued what is the reason for that so i can go into the license metric results i can see that uh the license model as i said is per device the license is found which are my entitlements is 130 and the licenses required are 156 that means i am deficient of 26 rights and hence the drew up cost is automatically getting calculated so so what servicenow sam has done is that it has determined uh what all devices has have got microsoft uh project installed and it has compared that with the number of licenses available by the organization and uh and because you know there is deficiency you see that uh you are non-compliant now as a sam manager of course you know i would want to know uh what is what is that entitlement which is there in the system so i can i can go and uh to the entitlement section i can see this entitlement i can open it up to get more details about this particular entitlement i can see that it is in use this is a skew number from microsoft so based on this queue using using servicenow content the system automatically populates all the details such as what is the software model what is the license metric you know and all the other details are also here for example the downgrade rights so uh you know this gives information to the sam manager that you know this is the entitlement and it's a per device kind of entitlement now um of course you know i would want to know a bit more about project in general so i can just go into the software model and understand that this software model for microsoft project is uh i've seen some internet issues sorry for that yeah so yeah this is the product and uh this is uh this is project 2016 professional um this is the next version of of of a project and uh you know other details such as uh you know what is the life cycle of the product uh and um and you know if there are any downgrades for this particular product that are also populated here so all this is automatically populated based on content and using all this different information servicenow sam is automatically able to determine the license compliance now another important thing uh or very useful thing that is coming up here is the removal candidates and you can see here that servicenow has automatically identified these removal candidates with low usage and this helps the sam manager to see why uh you know it is low usage so that means that uh this particular user is is not using uh microsoft project that much and uh hence this particular uh license could be reclaimed by the organization and once it's reclaimed your true up cost can be reduced because that could be offset by the by the same and then you know you can i was going to ask a question srinivas if i may um so you showed us the entitlements and you showed us the software model the software model itself is the one that is linking together so to speak the entitlements and the dis and the discovered software is that is that correct and that's what's being used to assist in that reconciliation and these are the results of reconciliation exactly exactly so based on what you have owned versus what you have deployed and you know the licensing model on that entitlement service now determines uh how much you're compliant and whether you're non-compliant or not and um and if you're non-compliant as we just discussed you know servicenow automatically creates these remediation options for you so one of the remediation option could be remove one license installed so that you could just remove your unless installs and become compliant or you could purchase those 26 rights and and then become compliant so all these options are available to the sam manager so that they can take actions on them and then become compliant so that was a bit about microsoft project now if as a sam manager i would want to understand more details about how those licenses got consumed because you know managers would want to know more details about how servicenow actually calculated these license compliance how did it assign these license licenses to those devices so in here you can see that all these devices have got microsoft project installed and uh and they're consuming just one right and i can just um [Music] click on it as a sam manager i can determine you know um what is the license metric you know uh and this uh is metric is the licensing model so in this case it's it's uh per device as you know and you can see that uh this particular machine is consuming how many writes now if i want to understand is is a project actually installed on it you cannot actually see that microsoft project is installed on it so this gives information to the sam manager that hey i've got microsoft project installed and for that particular device on which is installed it's consuming you know this many rights and so uh it gives more confidence in the sam manager as to how servicenow sam applied those licenses in the most uh most effective manner so that the organization can determine the license compliance if they are non-compliant create emulation options uh automatically so that action can be taken as well so that's a bit about microsoft project that's great and um you know there was some some uh comments i saw in the chat about it's worth mentioning to people that um there's downgrade rights applied in in the software model itself right so if you have licenses that are uh 2016 and those licenses can cover deployments that are 2013 or or what have you those licenses can be used for downgrade purposes exactly exactly so as i said you know uh our content is ever evolving we have got a huge content library and all these different data of downgrades the next version that is coming uh metric attributes etc they're all automatically added to the system and then servicenow uses this content uh automatically to determine your license compliance that's great let's talk about workstation we just did let's talk about server licensing so from a server licensing perspective i'll paint the picture again you know as a as a business i want to have the outcome of being compliant with microsoft sql again to mitigate and reduce any audit risk exposure so as an admin again i want to calculate the number of sql server instances deployed and in some cases count the number of cores being utilized by a product whether it's on-prem or on cloud so that i can compare those to the license count that i own very similarly the deliverable that i want to deliver to my to my to my boss to my company is an effective license position that gives a snapshot of where our licenses are today with our installations and deployment of the product then from there take action so talk to us a little bit about that srinivas how would we do that in the product sure sure victor um server licensing is uh of course you know more complex than the device or the per user licensing and in this you know uh because you know the cost is higher and the licensing models provided by microsoft are much more complex than uh than workstation licensing in this particular example what we are seeing is uh microsoft sql server as you know it's a hugely popular database software and it is deployed on-prem as well as in the cloud so in this particular use case it's deployed on-prem in a cluster and as you can see that you know it's deployed uh it's a sql server 2019 enterprise with software assurance which is a benefit by microsoft and uh and it's deployed on about six six virtual machines and uh on a cluster which has got about three hosts so you know the various licensing rules of sql server uh are applicable here and service now the good thing that servicenow does is that when it applies licenses it applies it's in the most cost effective manner of course you know this is not a licensing rule book that i'm just going to inundate the audience with but just to give a small background of it you know if you take sql server enterprise microsoft gives you the choice to license either the physical or the virtual machines and uh for sql server standard you could only license it by the virtual layer now that effectively means that if you have got sql server enterprise installations you could license either by the vm layer uh you could license the virtual machines or just the post and in this uh what servicenow does is that it defines which is cheaper uh with whether it's licensing the virtual machine layer or the physical layer and applies those licenses automatically in addition uh you know microsoft provides for some benefits of when you know you when the organization purchases a program called as software assurance so if if organizations have software assurance enabled then uh you know there are many other benefits like you know you get a license mobility benefit unlimited virtualization benefit and so on which can reduce your licensing costs so um effectively what service now sam does is that it looks at your entitlements it looks first whether you have software assurance or not then it looks as your installation base it looks at your installation base and uh and and determines uh you know whether you have got sql server enterprise or standard and then it combines both of them together to determine what is the cheapest way to license so in this particular case you know uh servicenow has demand that it's cheaper to license at the host layer because the number of writes required are just 12. and if you license at the virtual machine layer you'll require about 24 rights and hence that automatic uh license assignment happens at the host layer and you basically determine your license compliance position so that's about sql server deployment on-prem we'll see that in the product in a short while but let's move on to the next use case and then we'll see both of these use cases on the product and the next use case is uh on cloud you know sql server is a very very popular database software it's deployed on-prem but it's gaining traction on the cloud and with something known as uh bring your own license now organizations can use the existing on-prem licenses on public cloud platforms like aws and azure and so on and servicenow supports cloud licensing as well now just as i said you know this is not a licensing uh uh rule uh class uh but you know the rules on the cloud are different from the rules on prem and uh servicenow takes that also into consideration and applies those licensing rules for the cloud if it if it finds a deployment of sql server on the cloud uh versus what it finds on-prem and well when when it's doing that on cloud you know within the clouds also there are different licensing rules so azure has got something called as azure hybrid benefit which has some special benefits that you get uh if you deploy microsoft sql server on microsoft azure for example you know if you just have one sql server enterprise on-prem you can consume uh four sql server standard uh goes on azure and that is like a huge benefit so all those benefits are automatically applied as well on the cloud so that you can determine your license compliance position on-prem as well as in the cloud on one single platform what we have seen in other platforms is that you know cloud licensing happens in disparate tool and uh on-prem licensing happens on another two and it's very difficult for organizations to combine both of them and determine you know what is the single uh license compliance position across my entire hybrid infrastructure and what service now sam does incredibly well is that it combines both of them it combines the different licensing rules on-prem and cloud and gives you that one license compliance position across your entire hybrid infrastructure so that being said let's move to the product i will share my screen real quick and let me know if you can see that yes we're back on your screen all right so again you know the the framework the framework remains the same which is you know you get your sql server software models here you can see your different software models for 2019 enterprise to 2017 enterprise etc and you see your license metric results here you see that in this the the licensing model is per code we saw that in project is per device so the different licensing rules of burkard are applied the licenses owned here are 50 and the licenses required are 52. now if i go to entitlements i can see that i can see that i've got about 50 uh 50 licenses and i can see that uh you know i've got perpetual and software assurance as i said software assurance is a microsoft licensing benefit you get your you know unlimited virtualization license mobility benefits and a whole number of benefits if you use that and organizations do have um software assurance purchased from from microsoft so they can mention that in this and if if i if i just open this entitlement i can of course see more details about about this particular entitlement i can see that it is in use the license metric is there uh how many rights have purchased and so on now now as a sam manager i would want to know how these licenses got consumed uh i can see that 52 licenses are required and i'm non-compliant so i can just move into the details about how these licenses uh got consumed and i can see here that uh you know this is the cluster which we just saw and these are the the devices and because this virtual is is false it means that these are all uh all the hosts which are uh you know the the esx machines what service now sam has done is that it has automatically applied those optimization rules and it is determined that licensing on the host layer is more cheaper and and so it has assigned these licenses uh for the same now if i go into more details about how these licenses got applied i can see that uh this is the burko licensing model i can read more details about the perko licensing model as a sam manager i would want to understand what is this uh licensing model all about i can go into more details and understand what is the infrastructure which is consuming that right i can see that uh this is that host it has got one processor and two cores but the licensing codes are four now why is that and that is because you know the minimum licenses required uh per processor r4 again this is automatically applied by service now through uh content services and based on this metric attribute uh servicenow automatically applies these licenses so even though it is a one processor and two code machine the number of licenses required are four because as per licensing rules of microsoft we require a minimum of four rights here now i would also like to understand uh what are those virtual machines which have got sql installed so in this case as we just saw there are about six virtual machines on which uh sql server is installed and so if i want to understand more details about this particular virtual machine i can i can go into this i can see that what are the cores on this particular virtual machine i can see uh what is the software that is installed in this case microsoft sql server so in general it gives more details to the uh sam manager uh as to how these licenses got consumed in that infrastructure and then you know if there's any host affinity rules in this case there are no but if there were any host definitely rules they would have also come up here now another another important factor that the sam manager can look into to understand the infrastructure in more detail is is the dependency view uh which basically gives a dependency of all the infrastructure having uh having this particular sql server deployed so in this case i can see that uh there is this this particular cluster and uh if i just uh load more i can see that it has got uh it has got uh these three different esx servers on it this is the cluster and three different esx hosts on it and they have got all these different virtual machines running on it so uh with the dependency infrastructure view some managers you can understand in more detail how these licenses actually got got applied and of course you know as as as with as with everything in servicenow you get uh remediation actions uh where you can remove unlicensed stalls or purchase rights and you can uh take this action it opens up it opens up reclamation candidate workflows on which you could uh basically take action on so that is about uh on-prem licensing now coming to the next use case which was which is cloud let's just quickly go over to cloud again the same kind of infrastructure here you can see that the license metric is per core i own uh 130 rights license required are 108 and hence i'm compliant uh as a sand manager i understand that i've got perpetual with software assurance and if i go into more details about how the licenses got consumed i can understand more details about it so you can see that you know these licenses are consumed across azure and uh aws machines across the entire infrastructure and you can see these are the licenses required and uh the licensing status states that license so that everything is licensed and your compliant notice one more special thing is the cloud special right this is the azure hybrid benefit which you just talked about uh which is uh you get some benefits if you have got sql server deployed underscore in this particular case you can see that although you know this is a 16 core vm it just consumed four sql server enterprise rights and that is because of uh azure hybrid benefit which uh service now automatically applies again all these details like you know what are the processors what are the cores uh what are what is the installations uh running on that particular vm you can get all these details uh uh on on on this particular view and of course this is great yeah i i think this is great because it it helps educate not just um the sam manager but if the sam manager needs to explain like you said how were things calculated this type of this type of information here breaks it down right it gives the explanation of the the license metric it describes uh how it was calculated and then it shows specifically which are the devices or machines or users whatever whatever license metric you're looking at that is consuming the license so i think this helps you verify that that license requirement count i like that exactly exactly so this gives more information at the tips of the sam manager so that they can understand how servicenow calculated the licenses how those licenses got assigned and of course you know once they understand that it is uh then they can take the requisite actions if there are anything yeah so that was about to say yeah yeah that's about that's about the the server i think the last thing i'll say about that just to comment before we move to the next segment is the way that you were able to describe it that you can look at a particular product title and look at reconciliation just for that one product title gives you a lot of flexibility in terms of how you plan your work right i mean you might have 20 microsoft products that you need to get compliance for but if you focus on let's say your first two and get those you know squared away you can then move down the list of all your other requirements and other other products that you have and continuously build on the work that you have just through the the license metric that you have there in the screen exactly but some things are not always smooth right i mean some sometimes we have to troubleshoot and we need to uh make sure that we check ourselves on some things that are kind of leading practices so you have good results in reconciliation would you mind kind of going through what what you would consider helpful tips for workstation licensing and then we can go again and look at helpful tips for server licensing sure so the first one is uh you know achieve license compliance in batches so you you can start with uh a few products first like you know um project visual microsoft 365 then go to more complex softwares like sql and windows so that's point number one point number two is uh yeah focus first on your out of the box publishers before focusing on the other more custom or complex work we have seen in organizations that the majority of uh publishers are either microsoft oracle or you know or vmware but uh you know if there is anything else first you know focus on the out of the box support and then move to the other ones which brings us to point number three which is you know load your entitlements try to use vpns as much as possible because that would automate many things of the model creation downgrade rights uh metric attributes and so on number four is uh run discovery you know uh brand discovery create check uh yourself translations uh check if uh normalization is happening correctly and also you know also check if you have got sccm integrated or accv integrated into system which can give you software usage and that will help you offset your true up cost which brings us to point number five which is uh which is to you know verify your software models try to make them version specific and edition specific so that you can create your entitlements uh for for them which is and then we come to point number six you know make sure your product is nice and simple of course so we can go to the point number seven then which is uh check your suit component settings uh suites like microsoft 365 and so uh uh you know requires suit your speed to be configured correctly so uh ensure that your influence percentage your mandatory fields are uh accounted for correctly point number eight would be uh you know you would want to have certain software models excluded uh if if that's the case specifically for passive sql server installations for example you can make lums false point number nine is uh utilize your install conditions especially it is important in visual studio and point number 10 is utilize the locations if you want to prioritize uh any a particular licensing so that was a great conversation awesome awesome yeah let's walk through server server software helpful tips yeah service software set is a bit more complex so again but you know the some of the things will be same here as well focus on on on on those products uh which which are easy for example take sql and windows first and then you know move to more complex ones uh focus again on the out of the box support for sql server load entitlements first leverage vpns as much as possible uh ensure your entitlements are set up correctly you so again use pvpns short downgrades are there check run discovery check normalization um verify your software models are correct and then you can move to the next ones which are uh the similar ones you know uh make your product licensable uh set up so properties you know which could control your copter optimization settings verify your true up uh and see if you know your elps are correct or not and then this is one important thing which we have introduced recently which is health check it is released in tokyo you uh and it it's it's it's a great great product you know a great product feature what it does is that it can run through your existing configurations and determine uh if those configurations are correct or not if not correct it will give you a recommendation to correct that particular configuration and you can basically create those stars assign it to individuals and so on so please check that out it's soon to be released so that's about that's about it awesome yeah that's that's really exciting i am excited to to learn more about that health check when it comes out in tokyo we'll probably have a session on that uh in the future so let's break out for questions i know some came in the the chat form and some were also in the q a form if you do have any questions please use the q a and we'll start going through those uh michael do you want to call those out for us and shrini please address those questions as you see fit yeah absolutely so i'll start with one from melissa here um the service now have a discovery agent we can deploy on all devices in order to meter application and software usage and uh runtime and frequency yeah so you know servicenow has released agent client collector accv as you call it and it is specifically for this purpose it's an agent you can deploy it on your machines and servers and get software usage and it this is in addition to the uh you know servicenow discovery that we already have so okay fantastic wants to know how often are content service updated it's updated every wednesday every week you know you it's released and uh the good thing is that you know customers don't have to do anything it is automatically shipped uh to all all instances automatically so that's one thing which customers don't need to update it is automatically shipped okay fantastic um ed wants to know if um can you speak to how software installs are gathered and how both discovered install models and entitlement models are normalized and mapped towards each other yeah so you know it starts with discovery discovery uh discovers software's infrastructure etc and creates the software software installs in the system as soon as the software installs are created servicenow content runs through uh you know through the content it runs through the installation records and normalizes them which uh which uh basically creates a standard form of those installs uh on this it uses the uh the content that is shipped and with this it uh creates something known as discovery models which basically show that you know if your software installs are normalized a lot and based on your uh discovery models uh you know you you can create uh entitlements and software models for those entitlements and once you have your entitlements created and your discovery models are there uh servicenow sam reconciles both of these together so that uh based on the different licensing rules as we just saw whether it's per core or per user and determines your license compliance position so that's at a high level how servicenow sand works great i hope that provides some clarity in your question there ed um is wondering what the approximate number of vendors that can be normalized using content services is as of now yeah i just checked this probably we can answer this uh you know through mail to push i i don't remember the number of vendors we support a huge number of vendors so that number i don't have i need to check with the content services team i can uh i can say that for microsoft we support about 192k uh different uh schemes uh but you know the the total number of vendors that we support is is huge in number and i can i can just get those numbers and send it across if that's required yeah yeah there's there's a lot there's a lot of records that we have in the database and it's continuously growing um there was a session actually that we had not too long ago about our content service and normalization so i would i would say for those that have questions on that please be on the lookout we'll have that session again coming up in the future but we do have that recorded and up on the community so a lot of these questions related to content you will definitely find it there we have another question in the chat with the content services will models and catalogs also be updated if i understand this yes yeah yeah the answer is yes okay fantastic we have another question sent to me here that good suggestion to work on microsoft in phases how would you rank these environments in order of complexity or ease of success with sam server licensing o365 and workstation environment sorry i missed that question mike can you just repeat that no problem so how do you rank the environments of microsoft in order of complexity with sam the first being server licensing the second being office 365 and the third being workstation environment okay so i'll start with least complex more complex of course you know workstation licensing is the least complex which includes project visual etc then comes your subscription licenses like office 365 and then comes the highest complexity which is server license language includes windows server sql server and so on okay awesome um another question here microsoft and some other vendors have different licensing terms and requirements for server-based products with respect to non-production high availability and backup servers does sam cover these licensing scenarios and if so how yeah that's that's a pretty interesting question you know uh uh for for backups and passive type of server licensing uh we do support it uh but i would not say that you know we support all the different use cases because you know it's it's it's it's basically because you know we cannot discover that kind of infrastructure like you know discover uh passive infrastructure etc uh so i would just say that you know we support uh many of the use cases there but but but not in uh but not in its entirety uh and therefore you know it's always advisable for customers to uh you know have poke sam programs in place in addition to uh the sam product so that you know they can they can manage license compliance effectively but uh if there is any specific need for any specific license uh on backups etc just let us know we will look into it okay awesome um please keep the questions coming it looks like we have one more question um in the chat here so for software discovery do i need to configure any attributes to ensure i get complete discovery data i notice that i'm sometimes missing a version or edition and do you have any advice yeah yeah i think you know the very first thing we would advise is to keep your discover if you're using for example servicenow discovery keep your uh service now uh discovery and service mapping patterns uh application updated because you know there are constant updates to the pattern it's the store app so uh you know make sure that you install the latest store app of those patterns and and use that pattern so that you can get uh the maximum advantage we are constantly adding more more patterns uh so that you can discover more for you for your infrastructure so that's i think uh one of the major things that one can consider fantastic and looks like one last question is i was on the justification of usage and if that is automatically populated in the platform yeah so you know uh what the good thing is that you can configure reclamation rules on on on service now and uh basically you can say that you know if i don't use a particular software for let's say 90 days uh or 60 days and that is configurable aspect i want to uh you know classify that software as low usage or i've not used this software for you know for for uh three times in the last uh you know three months so those kind of rules you can configure uh and based on the based on what you configured the reclamation uh uh uh rules work and and the low usage reclamation candidates that we just saw are created so uh to answer that it's it's based on the configuration that you have done if you configure it uh servicenow will respect that configuration and create those low usage uh reclamation candidates awesome thanks everyone for those great questions back to you victor i appreciate that michael thank you and thanks for answering the question srinivasan to the folks out there really appreciate the questions we have more uh documentation around this to help you all get successful starting with training there's software asset management fundamentals which many of you probably have already taken or know about but in addition to that if you wanted a deeper dive into certain segments of our product and certain aspects like entitlements normalization discovery and reconciliation we actually have additional trainings out there on the learning community for you to access and oftentimes those trainings are no more than 15 or 20 minutes long in addition to that we have other documentations white papers and guides i'll call out just a couple of these managing microsoft sql server licenses a little bit of what trinivox talked about and showcased today track and manage microsoft software assurance using sam so there was a question in the chat about how we actually do that uh take a look at this white paper it'll explain more in depth on how we track that and then we talked a little bit about visual studio or at least made reference of it and we have a white paper around how to manage visual studio studio licenses and the last thing i'll say for everybody is if you wanted to have a central place where you can start and get information start with the community this is our home this is where we put a lot of our information documentation such as our getting started guide where we summarize a lot of different steps on how to set up to success with sam and then we list out trainings as well as other resources and materials that i discussed today we hope that you all enjoyed the session uh and and found this very valuable and we look forward to having you on more of these sessions in the future thank you and have a great week we'll talk soon you