Asset Management › Collect Tasks › Software Discovery Collect Task

Software Discovery Collect Task

The software discovery collect task lets you collect the software inventory from the agent computers. The asset management agent scans the computers and discovers the software based on either of the following methods:

• Signature Scanning (Default)—A software signature defines the attributes of a software application, such as the main executable file name, other associated files, size range, version range, creation, and modification dates of the software. All these attributes of a software signature uniquely identify a software application or virtual application image.

  Software signatures in asset management are created as software definitions. You can create software definitions for a product, release, patch, suite, or virtual application image. By default, asset management provides pre-defined software signatures covering the most widely used software in the IT industry.

  Note: The new signatures pushed down by the scalability server for detecting virtual application images are specially tagged, such that they are ignored by legacy agents. Therefore, only Release 12.5 agents will process the signatures and inventory virtual applications correctly.

• Heuristic Scanning—This light-weight scanning method looks at sources on the agents such as the add/remove database, the Windows Start menu items, or the MSI database, to quickly return a list of installed software.

By default, the configuration given under the All Computers, Group Details, Configuration, Collect Tasks folder is applicable to all the computers. However, you can perform different types of scanning on different computers in the domain by creating new collect tasks.

More information:

Software Folder

Select Method for Software Discovery Collect Task

Specify General Settings for a Collect Task

Virtual Application Images Folder