While all options are important, the core of a defensible license position, especially for complex agreements, is the correct mapping of entitlements and deployments to the agreed-upon license metric (e.g., Processor, User, Core). An audit hinges on proving compliance against the specific metric in the contract. Incorrect metric mapping renders all other data meaningless for the audit.

Software License Rules (SLRs) are the mechanism in SAM Pro that defines how a license is consumed. For a concurrent user model, you must create an SLR that specifies the metric (e.g., ‘Concurrent User’) and the logic for counting consumption, typically by integrating with a license manager (like FlexNet) to pull session data. This rule then automatically calculates usage against the entitlement.

Normalization rules are critical for translating raw discovery data (like executable names ‘winword.exe’, ‘msaccess.exe’) into the standardized Software Product Model in the CMDB. If a rule is missing or incorrect, Discovery finds the files but cannot map them to a known software product, causing those deployments to be missed during reconciliation and creating a false surplus.

Software Request Fulfillment is the specific SAM Pro application that integrates with ServiceNow’s Request Management. It allows you to create catalog items for software requests that automatically check license availability (from pools or allocations), enforce approval workflows based on policy, and can even trigger automated provisioning if integrated with software distribution tools.

The Product Usage report (or similar usage analytics) is designed specifically for reclamation initiatives. It analyzes data from discovery or agents to show how often and how long software is actually used. Applications with very low usage frequency (e.g., used less than once in 90 days) or short duration are prime candidates for reclamation, allowing you to free up licenses before they come up for renewal.

The Entitlement table is the core SAM Pro table for recording license rights. It stores key details from contracts: product, metric, quantity, start/end dates, and agreement reference. This data is the ‘entitlement’ side of the license position equation. The Reconcile process compares deployments (consumption) against these entitlement records to determine compliance.

SAM Pro provides a dedicated Entitlement Import module (accessible via ‘Import Entitlements’ in the application navigator). This tool is designed for this task. It allows you to define a source (like the spreadsheet), map its columns to Entitlement fields, and most importantly, it includes logic to match the incoming product/publisher data to existing Software Product Models in the catalog, ensuring data integrity and proper reconciliation.

For regular, file-based data feeds from external sources (like cloud usage reports), the standard and scalable ServiceNow approach is to use Scheduled Import Sets. You can configure an import to run monthly, automatically fetch the report file (via SFTP, email, etc.), use a Transform Map to parse the data, and then update the relevant consumption tables in SAM Pro. This minimizes manual effort and ensures timely data updates.

For processor/Core-based licensing, the consumption calculation depends on the physical hardware topology. The critical attributes are the number of physical CPU Sockets and the number of Cores per Socket. SAM Pro uses these values (often populated by Discovery) along with the specific licensing rules (e.g., core factor tables for vendors like IBM or Oracle) to calculate the required license count.

While all options are important, the core of a defensible license position, especially for complex agreements, is the correct mapping of entitlements and deployments to the agreed-upon license metric (e.g., Processor, User, Core). An audit hinges on proving compliance against the specific metric in the contract. Incorrect metric mapping renders all other data meaningless for the audit.0