Containers post a significant challenge for IT
Many organizations now face unprecedented challenges. Employees are working remotely almost entirely, and IT needs to keep up with the demand for new devices, software and more. IT also needs to keep an eye on utilization, maintaining governance and optimizing spend.
All these demands are coming on top of managing assets in complex environments as more disruptive technology enters the mix. And containers are causing chaos in IT environments right now; managing licenses on-premises and in the cloud is demanding enough for most organizations, but it’s even more difficult for IT to get visibility into the software they have running in containers.
Container management can be precarious for an organization, and you can easily lose sight of applications and whether or not you are license compliant. Additionally, with an uncertainty of how container-based licensing is going to play out, there are compliance and cost issues that may result.
Here’s how Flexera helps with container management
As demonstrated by our latest release, Flexera is focused on helping organizations discover and visualize software running in containers.
With Flexera One, you can discover assets running in containers with expediency and accuracy, including those in Kubernetes. Additionally, we now provide a single source of truth for IBM product container licensing and reporting as well as granular transparency into Kubernetes OpenShift-orchestrated containers. With Flexera One, you can be sure that no stone is left unturned when it comes to visibility within your organization’s containers.
Our latest release introduces a new tool for collecting Kubernetes cluster and container image software inventory – the Flexera Kubernetes inventory agent – initially available on Linux x86_64 platforms. This is in addition to the existing FlexNet inventory agent, which remains available as always.
The Flexera Kubernetes inventory agent brings new functionality in three key areas:
IT Asset Management
It all starts with knowing what’s in your IT ecosystem. Flexera One discovers even the most elusive assets whether on-prem, SaaS, cloud, containers and more.
- Resources—The Flexera Kubernetes inventory agent uses the Kubernetes API to collect resource information assigned to each cluster to report on nodes, pods and annotations assigned to images.
- IBM License Service—For license compliance for IBM products running within Kubernetes clusters, use of the IBM License Service is mandatory for tracking/reporting sub-capacity consumption of purchased entitlements for the IBM VPC or IBM PVU licenses in use.
- Inventory—The Flexera Kubernetes inventory agent can return software inventory from both the nodes and from container images running in your Kubernetes cluster(s).
Visibility regardless of provider
As part of our latest release regarding containers, we’ve also ensured that our product is up to date with the latest version of AWS Kubernetes EKS. You can be assured that our unified discovery clusters continue to run with a supported version of Kubernetes.
Want to see how we can help you with container management?
