The combination of hardware inventory, cloud services, software audit and application metering that Snow Inventory provides delivers the ability to browse, discover and track all software. Its accuracy and completeness provides the foundation for Snow’s Software Recognition Service to perform labor-saving data normalization – filtering out irrelevant records and determining publisher and product names, versions and editions. When multiple inventory sources are used, in addition to its own discovery and inventory of software and connected network equipment, Snow Inventory is the single source of truth and central hub pulling in data from any source using Snow Integration Connectors. 

Snow Inventory automatically collects usage information on all applications running across the cloud and network. Also, it collects, discovers and meters usage of virtual and streamed applications (including usage of virtual desktops – VDI) as well as applications running from within the datacenter such as Citrix and Microsoft RDS. This high quality  data is used in Snow Licenses Manager to identify areas of cost optimization and license harvesting as well as generate management reports on usage across cloud services and all applications.

Snow Inventory supports multiple virtualization technologies including Microsoft (Hyper-V, RDS and App-V), VMware (vSphere, View and ThinApp), Citrix (XenServer, XenDesktop and XenApp) and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. With immediate access to near-real-time information about the state of your computers’ hardware and softwarewhether in the network or in IaaS environments, Snow Inventory allows IT managers to do more than just reactively monitor status. Snow Inventory enables managers to proactively manage software usage, actively resolve issues and analyze changes across the entire estate.

For applications running in the cloud, compliance is usually not the primary challenge as the access to the application is controlled through an online subscription. However, optimizing your spend in the cloud requires you to understand who is actually using these cloud services and needs an active subscription. Snow Inventory has built-in capabilities to track the usage of all cloud-based applications down to the user and feature-usage level. Optimization and harvesting of subscriptions is made easy when Snow shows you entire groups of users that aren’t utilizing high-cost, full featured subscriptions, like Office 365 E5, and can be re-assigned lower level subscriptions, like Office 365 E1.

IT teams and business units are increasingly enabled to spin up environments in cloud services such as AWS and Azure. These deployments, while efficient and much used by many teams, are typically difficult for IT to track and decrease visibility of the technology usage and spend. Management of IaaS begins with visibility into utilization and optimization is simplified when under-utilized resources are reported, removed or reallocated as needed. Integration with Snow Automation Platform further simplifies the request, approval, allocation and decommissioning process for expensive cloud services.

To enable organizations to fully manage the cloud services and licensable applications discovered across the network, Snow Inventory is fully integrated with Snow License Manager. Audit information is seamlessly imported into Snow License Manager’s interface and identified software and subscriptions are automatically grouped into bundles and commercial suites.  

With up-to-date information about the hardware, cloud services and software assets across the corporate network and public clouds, Snow Inventory provides the data and management reporting engine necessary to create realistic plans and future budgets based on actual usage and real needs.

Integrating Snow Inventory with your existing help desk systems can help accelerate problem resolution times, improve first-time fixes and improve user satisfaction. Snow Inventory is the ideal source of low level hardware and software details suitable for feeding into an ITSM solution such ServiceNow.