August 2022
Flexera One introduced the following new features and enhancements this month.
Cloud Cost Optimization
Cloud Cost Optimization added the following new features and enhancements in August 2022.
Creating custom spend recommendations for additional saving opportunities
This feature is available with Cloud Cost Optimization.
Flexera has released an update to the Automation and Cloud Cost Optimization solution areas to allow customers to create custom recommendations that populate with Total Potential Savings and recommendation details.
For example, a user may want to customize an existing Flexera policy or create a new policy from scratch to meet their business needs. The user can use the new policy template attributes to inform the recommendation engine to ingest their new policy incident detail. The recommendation engine will show the new policy's total potential savings and recommendation details.
Read more about this update in the Create a Recommendation from a Policy Template section of the Flexera One Help.
Reserved Instances now include more AWS services
This feature is available with Cloud Cost Optimization.
We are pleased to announce that the Cloud Cost Optimization Reserved Instances page now supports all AWS Services which support Reserved Instances. The update allows users to see the AWS Service, as well as other important details such as Utilization, Expiration date, Instance Type, Platform and more.
List of Services included:
- EC2 Compute
- RDS
- ElasticCache
- ElasticSearch
- Redshift
For related documentation, refer to Amazon Web Services Reserved Instances in the Flexera One Help.
Total Potential Savings support for Azure Resource Groups
This feature is available with Cloud Cost Optimization.
As we continue to improve our recent Spend Recommendations feature, we have added support for Azure Resource Groups. In this update, Recommendations are assigned to Billing Centers that are allocated to Azure Resource Groups. This allows the Cost Center owner to view Recommendations specific to the business needs to take the necessary action for savings optimization.
For additional information refer to the following topics in the Flexera One Help:
IT Asset Management
IT Asset Management added the following new features and enhancements in August 2022.
Enhancement of FlexNet Inventory Agent to detect additional Java publishers
This enhancement is available with IT Asset Management.
Enhanced the agents Java publisher detection by making an additional call to the Java launcher with the HotSpot JVM flag "-XshowSettings -version".
This option is described in the Oracle Java launcher description page https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/tools/unix/java.html (look for "-XshowSettings")
In addition to this change, the agent will also check if calling the Java launcher with only the “-version” parameter produces output which mentions the words "Java HotSpot".
This indicates the publisher is “Oracle Corporation” in the event that "-XshowSettings" is not supported in an older version of the Java launcher.
Enhancement of FlexNet Inventory Agent to detect the edition of SQL Server Reporting Services system installed as standalone
This enhancement is available with IT Asset Management.
Previously, if the SQL Server Reporting Services system was installed as standalone and separate from the SQL Server Database installation, the edition of this standalone installation would not be reported. From this release, the FlexNet inventory agent detects and reports the edition of the SQL Server Reporting Services system that is installed stand-alone.
Enhancement in the Application Transparency report to exclude inactive devices
This enhancement is available with IT Asset Management.
Up until now, the Application Transparency report included application evidence collected from inactive/decommissioned devices.
To avoid customers having to interpret large volumes of redundant application evidences', the report will now no longer collect evidence from these devices, and instead will only focus on active devices.
This will remove any confusion concerning out of licensed scope counts. From this release onwards, the report will only show active devices.
Updated lists of supported operating systems and compatibility with other products
This enhancement is available with IT Asset Management.
The following operating system versions have been added to the list of supported operating systems on FlexNet inventory agent:
- OpenSuSE Leap 15.4
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.6
- SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 15.4
The following product versions have been added to the compatibility list of IT Asset Management with other products:
- IBM License Metric Tool (ILMT) or HCL BigFix Inventory on IBM DB2 9.2.28
- IBM License Metric Tool (ILMT) or HCL BigFix Inventory on Microsoft SQL Server 9.2.28
Fix for the issue of unnecessary data being gathered from the Oracle Fusion Middleware scanning
This enhancement is available with IT Asset Management.
Previously, the Oracle Fusion Middleware scanning returned unnecessary data. This release resolves this issue. As a result, you might notice a decrease in the size of database log files and the NDI files generated.
Query the Windows Server Optimization Flat View report using the GetCustomViewResult SOAP API
This enhancement is available with IT Asset Management.
The Windows Server Optimization Flat View report can now be queried for automated allocation to optimal licenses using the GetCustomViewResult SOAP API.
To do this, you will need to obtain the ID of the report, which you can find in the FNMP Compliance database (in the ComplianceSavedSearch table), or by using the ReportIndex REST API https://docs.flexera.com/FlexeraOneAPI/ITAMDataAPI/#api-Reports-reportsIndex.
Email and Account Name columns added to Consumption tab
This feature is available with IT Asset Management.
Two additional columns have been added to the Consumption tab within License Properties.
- Email—The email address for the user who is consuming from this user-based license.
- Account name—The user account name that corresponds to a specific user within your enterprise and is used to log into the system.
These new columns can help identify those users consuming licenses whose user name is missing or ambiguous in IT Asset Management.
For more details on the Consumption tab, see Consumption Tab in the Flexera One Help.
AWS Account ID values can now be imported to inventory device records
This enhancement is available with IT Asset Management.
This R1-5 enhancement allows AWS account ID values gathered by the ndtrack from the AWS API, to be imported to the "Account" field in the cloud service provider properties.
Cloud service provider properties can be viewed by viewing a inventory device record.
This enhancement will help users to easily map imported instance ID details and to make sense of large volumes of AWS instance data in their IT Asset Management system.
Instance IDs are useful when combined with an AWS account ID, but in the absence of an account ID they are insignificant, meaning data concerning short-lived instances in IT Asset Management cannot be mapped to anything plausible to AWS administrators.
New Named User Licenses Consumption and Optimization report
This feature is available with IT Asset Management.
The new Named User Licenses Consumption and Optimization report allows Software Asset Managers to actively track subscriptions for installed applications, and returns license consumption for all named user licenses.
By design, named user licenses can be complex as subscriptions often allow for bundled software. This makes it hard to understand what applications (installed applications, installed and used applications) are consuming the named user license.
To address this complexity and optimization opportunity, this report brings a summarized view, per user consumption that provides all details to understand the consumptions: installed and used applications consuming the license.
The report returns extensive user details such as full name, email address and so on. As well as consumption details such as installed applications consuming licenses, and installed and used applications consuming licenses.
Beyond Software Asset Management data transparency, the report computes optimization recommendations assessing each user(s) with an active subscription against lower cost subscriptions from the same Publisher, for installed and used applications. Specifically for Adobe, the report will identify if it's cheaper to license standalone Adobe products in comparison to subscribing to the Creative Cloud All Apps license subscription.
The report provides all cost information (current cost, optimal cost, potential saving for users, total potential saving and so on).
If the subscription or online usage comes from SaaS Manager, the optimization logic for the report will still apply.
Software Asset Managers can subsequently use this data to action subscription(s) downgrades.
The report does not include Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN). MSDN has a very specific configuration (in certain cases, can have hundreds of applications linked to a license) and does not have any downgrade capability.
For more details, see Named User Licenses Consumption and Optimization Report.
SaaS Management
SaaS Management added the following new features and enhancements in August 2022.
Azure SSO performance improvements
This enhancement is available with SaaS Management.
It is common for customers to have ~500k user accounts in Azure, which was resulting in ~500k API calls when retrieving the Single Sign-On (SSO) applications that are assigned to those users. This volume of API calls - in almost all instances - resulted in the SaaS Management task failing due to a hard 8-hour stop.
This issue has been addressed by using the Microsoft AppRoleAssignments API. This API endpoint allows Flexera to approach the challenge in a different way by passing the application ID (rather than the user ID previously) and retrieving the list of assigned users. By reducing the number of API calls, the managed application is hugely more efficient.
For further details, refer to the Flexera One Help: