Welcome to the first installment of our new product updates blog series! We are constantly working to provide our customers with cutting-edge solutions and technology. This series will showcase our latest capabilities, features, improvements, and innovations designed to help you maximize the value of our products.
Innovation Area: ITAM
New: Overview dashboards for SAM on Snow Atlas
Snow Atlas has some new dashboards to help draw attention to areas you need to investigate now. With these three new dashboards, you can:
- View total spend, with a trend of spending over the last year. Customers can also see how much spend is potentially wasted with unallocated licenses. You can also look at the top types of applications where you could investigate application rationalization activities to further reduce spend.
- See actionable data to reduce risk in the compliance dashboard. Customers can see upcoming applications that will be end of life or end of support in the next 30/90/180 days. You can also view where you are over-licensed (and out of compliance) and which renewals are coming up that you need to prepare for.
- Check in on the progress of Snow Atlas deployment with the entitlements dashboard, where you can see the number of device entitlements against device entitlements used. We also offer insights into the most expensive applications and usage of these applications, so SAM professionals can pinpoint where costly waste is happening.
New: SKU browser on Flexera One ITAM
A popular customer feature request, SKU details can be now auto-populated in purchase orders allowing a much smoother experience and reduction of manual time and effort in creating new orders. The SKU browser displays any software SKU that is recognized and populated in the IT asset management SKU library. On accessing the SKU browser, you can enter a SKU number and then browse or search by publisher and product to return a list of SKUs, along with additional information to help you choose the most relevant option. SKU browser details are continuously updated with information from the application rights library.
For users who need to view SKU information, a new role called “SKU Library” has been introduced with three privilege rights: read-only, none, and custom.
Cloud License Management on Snow Atlas
The Cloud License Management feature in SAM on Snow Atlas is now available in early access.
This capability provides visibility into your software usage on Azure with support for Windows Server and SQL Server. By capturing whether resources are bring-your-own-license (BYOL) or pay-as-you-go (PAYG), Cloud License Management helps IT professionals and SAM managers optimize their software licensing costs, saving 50-85% off PAYG by converting those licenses to BYOL. In addition to reducing costs, this capability helps you understand your license position across your on-premises and cloud environments.
- By connecting directly without an agent to your cloud usage data, our solution discovers Windows Server and SQL Server instances running in Azure and identifies instances that are BYOL eligible.
- By understanding your current entitlements and license position, our solution can identify available licenses and calculate potential savings for transitioning from PAYG to BYOL licenses.
- With visibility to license usage across your on-premises and Azure environments, you can ensure complete hybrid license compliance.
To get involved in our early access program, connect with your Flexera Account Manager.
New connector for Tanium on Snow Atlas and Snow Spend Optimizer on-premises
Our new connector for Tanium, available in both Snow Atlas and on-premises Spend Optimizer, helps organizations gain visibility of software and hardware assets discovered via Tanium. Utilizing our Data Intelligence Service and insights, customers can then:
- Map applications to devices and users.
- Identify unallocated and unused licenses.
- Identify applications that are EOL/EOS that should be removed or upgraded.
Support for private applications on Snow Atlas
This feature gives customers the ability to add custom applications to Snow Atlas, starting with SAM on Snow Atlas, so that they can easily discover custom applications and perform optimization and compliance analysis. One use case for leveraging this feature is to quickly identify devices impacted by the recent high-impact PKFail vulnerability.
General access: Package builder for on-premises Snow Spend Optimizer
On-premises customers using Snow Spend Optimizer now have access to leverage the package builder on Snow Atlas. The package builder helps you get fully configured and ready to install Snow Inventory Agent for Windows, MacOS, Linux, and Unix within minutes. When creating your inventory package, you can also add files and scripts (such as Snow-maintained scripts like the Inventory Oracle Scanners) to give the agent additional capabilities.
To obtain access to this new feature, follow the instructions in this Snow Globe Article. See more information about the package builder in our product documentation.
Innovation Area: SaaS Management
Multiple subscription insights in Snow SaaS Management
Snow SaaS Management now offers application insights to help organizations reduce spend, such as:
- Alerts for expiring subscriptions and associated data to forecast future renewal spend.
- Visibility to users with multiple subscriptions for the same application and the cost impact for reclaiming those licenses.
More Salesforce insights in Flexera One SaaS Management
Flexera One SaaS Management has enhanced several Salesforce capabilities, including granular usage insights for Salesforce consumption-based licenses to identify potential license overages or underutilization to help align licensing strategies with actual usage, potentially leading to financial efficiencies and minimizing compliance risks.
Users are now also able to exclude Salesforce customer community and partner user licenses from license activity and suspicious activity metrics to provide more accurate Salesforce license usage across your organization and increase the efficiency of threat detection.
Security
Software Vulnerability Management enhancements
The latest release of Software Vulnerability Manager (SVM) now supports installation on RHEL 8 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). Along with this, all recent updates made to the SVM Cloud and Patch Publisher will now be available to our SVM on-prem customers through this update. Some important enhancements include:
- Enhancements to user interface such as improvements in Smart Group Criteria to include a new filter option (“Does Not Contain”), streamlined Patch Deployment Status to more easily identify package deployment, the introduction of a “Vulnerabilities Found vs. Vulnerability Resolved” widget, and support for CVSS v4 scores, improving the existing standard for Secunia advisories.
- Patch publisher enhancements such as support for Tanium Unified Endpoint Management System and added support for updating the minimum version in applicability rules.
For more detailed information, see our release notes here.
FinOps Capabilities
Comprehensive visibility into savings plans for Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS)
FinOps teams can now see a comprehensive list of purchased savings plans including cost, utilization percentage, and expiration dates for both Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. This feature provides an in-depth, 30-day view of all savings plans, enabling users to track and analyze their organization’s financial commitments more effectively. Documentation on this new feature is provided here.
Enhanced support for Azure cost and usage exports
Flexera Cloud Cost Optimization has added support for the new Azure cost exports experience which is currently in Azure preview. This feature will enable users to create a scheduled, recurring task to export the enhanced cost and usage datasets provided by this new Azure capability. These datasets can be configured to be exported to Azure blob or file storage on a user-specific cadence. For additional information on this new feature, please view the details here.
Group rate and usage recommendations to derive further insights
Flexera Cloud Cost Optimization has enhanced its cloud cost and usage recommendations support to include the capability to group these recommendations based on user-specific criteria. This enables users to draw additional insights into cost optimization opportunities by analyzing combined recommendations across multiple dimensions to identify recommendations with the highest potential savings. For more detailed information, please see here.
Partner Management Capabilities
Centralized view of customers in Snow Atlas
Our partners can now view many key metrics, including computers, on-premises and SaaS applications, licenses and usage data, for all their managed customers in one centralized customer overview in Snow Atlas.
This information can help partners assess if their customers are making full use of their purchased licenses, and its visualization provides insights to where their customers might require additional products or services.
Click here for more information and documentation on these new capabilities.
What’s next?
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