July 2023
Flexera One introduced the following new features and enhancements this month.
IT Asset Management
IT Asset Management released the following new features and enhancements in July 2023.
Citrix Cloud adapter enhancement
This enhancement is available with IT Asset Management.
The Citrix Cloud adapter released in 2022 R2 has been further enhanced to now recognize entitlement access for virtual desktops and application level access for streamed applications, giving users better visibility into their Citrix estate.
With this new capability, IT Asset Management can account for application license consumption for scenarios where Desktop Entitlement is present for a delivery group, or where Application-Level User restriction is present for application(s) for a delivery group, or both desktops and applications are delivered from a delivery group. In Citrix Cloud, desktop and application user access is one level below the delivery group level (the delivery group level is the parent level above desktops and applications).
You can view Citrix virtual desktop data by running the Citrix Virtual Desktop Installer Evidence Report. To view application data, run the Citrix Virtual Apps Installer Evidence Report.
In order for IT Asset Management to collect data from the desktop and application level, Users/Group of Users and Applications/Group of Applications must be assigned at the delivery group level and also at the desktop level and application level. For example, for virtual desktop access, if there are five users in total assigned at delivery group level but only two out of those five are assigned at desktop level, then only two virtual machines will be created. Virtual desktop evidence collected when running the report in IT Asset Management will show data pertaining to those two virtual machines. Data will not show for all five users that are in the delivery group, only those at delivery group level and desktop level.
Product documentation for how to manage Entitlement Access for virtual desktops and Application Level Access for streamed applications in Citrix is available in the Manage Delivery Groups topic in the Citrix Online Help.
Until now, only delivery groups that exclusively streamed applications were queried. That's no longer the case with this enhancement. The Citrix Cloud adapter has been updated to query delivery groups that stream both applications and desktops.
Applications streamed from persistent VDIs are now also queried. Unlike non-persistent VDIs, persistent VDIs are static and not randomly assigned. If licenses are in use, a virtual machine is created and data will be collected and imported into IT Asset Management.
Blocked List users in a Citrix delivery group or desktop are not supported.
Changes to supported operating systems and compatibility with other products
This enhancement is available with IT Asset Management.
The following changes have been made to the list of supported operating systems on the FlexNet inventory agent:
- The minimum supported version of macOS has changed from 10.9 to 10.15.4. In other words, versions 10.9–10.15.3 are no longer supported. In addition, Rosetta 2 is not longer required for the FlexNet inventory agent to run on macOS on Apple M-series processors.
- New support is now provided for Linux operating systems running on the ARM64/AArch64 architecture.
The following product versions have been added to the compatibility list of IT Asset Management with other products:
- Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (previously Microsoft SCCM or SMS) 2303
- VMware vSphere/vCenter/ESXi 8.0
For the full lists, see Prerequisite Software and Compatibility with Other Products in System Requirements and Compatibility.
Licenses and Application Publisher tabs added to Vendor Properties
This enhancement is available with IT Asset Management.
Two new tabs Licenses and Application Publisher have been added to Vendor Properties.
- Licenses —Displays the licenses authorized and provided by the vendor.
- Application Publishers —Displays the application publisher associated with the vendor. For example, Microsoft is an application publisher and the corresponding vendor is Microsoft UK. The publisher is calculated by analyzing existing purchase license and contract records and how they are linked to applications.
For more details, see Vendor Properties.
Tanium adapter enhanced to support token based authentication
This enhancement is available with IT Asset Management.
The Tanium adapter now allows you to export inventory data from Tanium On-Premises and Tanium Cloud platform into IT Asset Management using Token based Authentication.
The authentication type can be chosen when configuring the FlexNet Beacon to connect with Tanium On-Premises or the Tanium Cloud API, by selecting the Authentication Flow drop-down and choosing either Client Credentials (only applicable for On-Premises) or ApiToken (applicable for both Tanium On-Premises as well as Tanium Cloud).
For more details, see Tanium Adapter in Inventory Adapters and Connectors Reference.
New support for gathering inventory from Linux running on ARM64/AArch64
This feature is available with IT Asset Management.
Previously, customers could not use the FlexNet inventory agent on Linux operating systems running on processors of the ARM64 architecture (also known as the AArch64 architecture), such as Amazon Graviton processors.
Now, the FlexNet inventory agent supports gathering inventory from Linux running on the ARM64/Aarch64 architecture.
For more details, refer to Gathering FlexNet Inventory.
New Application Publishers screen
This feature is available with IT Asset Management.
The Application Publishers screen shows you the number of active licenses and other metrics for each application publisher against all application publishers listed in the Application Recognition Library. At a glance, the Application Publishers screen contains column data pertaining to licenses, contracts, processed purchases and provides quick indication on what publishers are currently being managed in your organization.
To see vendor details and total spend on publishers (over a period of five years and for the last three years by quarter), you can drill down through publisher data by selecting the Publisher Name in the grid. This opens the Publisher Properties screen.
An application publisher or publisher is a third-party company or entity responsible for developing applications and software. In IT Asset Management, a vendor differs from a publisher and is any third-party company or entity that sells this software to your organization and is typically local. For example, Microsoft is an application publisher and the corresponding vendor is Microsoft UK. You can see associated vendors by selecting the Vendors tab.
For more details, see Application Publishers.
New method to perform business adapter imports
This feature is available with IT Asset Management.
Previously, for cloud-connected inventory beacons, users could only perform business adapter imports from the FlexNet Beacon console, either manually or by using the scheduling function.
From this release, users no longer need to only rely on the FlexNet Beacon application to perform business adapter imports. While business adapter imports still need to be created with the FlexNet Beacon application, you can now execute existing imports outside the application by using the FlxBizAdapterImporter command line tool.
For more details, see Command Line for FlxBizAdapterImporter in Using FlexNet Business Adapters.