How-to

How to maintain the Software Catalog

Use Case

The Software Catalog is a centralized repository that keeps track of detailed information for all the software across your organization. Most likely you do not want to track all the software products that have been discovered, and you have to clean up the catalog from time to time. To remove unwanted records from the Software Catalog without disrupting the software management process, it is important to understand how the catalog works. This article describes a few use cases for maintaining the Service Catalog.

About Software Catalog

All software discovered during the audit end up in the Software Catalog. However, that Software Catalog is not just a repository of Software Product records; it is also a storage of software recognition rules. Alloy Discovery (namely, the Inventory Server) uses those rules to identify software products when processing audit snapshots.

Alloy Discovery populates the Software Catalog automatically. Then, you should manually maintain the catalog: add, modify, and delete recognition rules and Software Product records. For instructions, see Alloy Discovery Guide: Managing the Software Catalog. As a part of regular maintenance, you may want to delete records of those software products that no longer have discovered installations.

Delete records of products with no discovered installations

The Software Catalog is a central repository of all software ever discovered across your organization, and software stays there even after being uninstalled. See how you can clean up the catalog and delete records of software products no longer installed, i.e., do not have any discovered installations.

To delete software products with no discovered installations:

  1. In the Alloy Discovery, select Tools > Software Catalog from the main menu.

  2. In the grid, right-click any Software Product record which has "null" as the value in its Discovered Installation field and choose Filter > Filter by selected Field from the pop-up menu.

  3. Select all records and click Delete.