Product edition and version discovery

You often need edition and version data for products when purchasing upgrades or calculating license usage, yet this information isn't always part of device inventory. The solution is to use both a Discovery Services scan configuration and a Data Translation Services (DTS) rule to gather edition and version data that's not attainable with a normal network scan and add that information into inventory.

Future releases of Data Analytics will continue to update the list of products that you can configure edition and version discovery for.

Edition and version discovery for Microsoft Exchange, Oracle Weblogic, and Scooter Software Beyond Compare

For some products, edition and/or version information doesn't display by default in a device's inventory. These products often install with a text file that contains the edition and/or version information you need, but getting that data into inventory is a challenge.

The solution for obtaining this information is to define a Discovery Services scan configuration that also runs a DTS rule. The configuration scans all devices selected, and if it can connect, pulls the text file into the Computer.Software.Configuration Files.File component of the devices’ inventory. At that point, the DTS rule searches the file and adds the version and/or edition data to the Computer.Software.Additional Detection attribute.

The critical components for defining such a configuration are already available in Discovery Services, and the DTS rule needed for each product installs by default with Data Analytics.

Edition discovery for Microsoft SQL Server

You use a Discovery Services scan configuration to pull these text files into inventory, and then use a DTS rule to identify the edition and/or version information and add it to the inventory database. For example, the .product.properties file that installs with Oracle Weblogic contains the correct version of Weblogic installed on your devices.

One product that's challenging to license properly is Microsoft SQL Server. When you install SQL Server on any of your network servers, it creates the same Programs entries or registry values regardless of edition. The same executable files are run whether you install Enterprise, Standard, Developer, or Express, so querying off the inventory database is nearly impossible when you want to determine the edition of SQL Server to purchase.

The one place in the registry where the current edition of SQL Server is stored is in the instance description. The problem here is that the registry key to search for is tied to the instance name. You don’t have a good way of knowing what the exact key will be ahead of time, so you can’t configure the inventory scanner to scan for it.

The solution is to create a scan configuration in Discovery Services that gathers this information, which then enables the licensed-software rules in Data Translation Services to correctly assign the edition of SQL Server being used.

You must have administrator access to the SQL Server devices you're configuring discovery for.