What are the different ITOM licenses categories?

• Visibility

• Health

• Optimization

How are ITOM Health licenses counted?

Events?

When events are received by ITOM Health, an entry will either be added or updated in the Event Management License Usage (em_unique_nodes) table based on the monitored target specified in the health message.  We attempt to link the License Usage entry to its corresponding CMDB CI; if a corresponding CI cannot be found for a monitored target, the License Usage entry will be assigned the type Unknown.

As of Paris Patch 2, the CI association for licensing is based on the CI ultimately bound to the Alert, which may involve additional binding logic, and therefore can reduce the number of Unknown entries.  Additionally, events that do not get promoted to the Alert stage will not update the License Usage, effectively ignoring sources for licensing whose events are ignored.

Entries in the Event Management License Usage table are removed once they have not been updated for 365 days.

Note that the Event Management License Usage table was originally built for the Node-based model, and is still used to support customers on that legacy model.  The Is Licensable column only applies to the Node-based licensing model.

In our daily counts, we filter entries in the License Usage table by their linked CIs (if they are of an effective licensable class) meeting the following criteria at that moment:

• • Duplicate of (duplicate_of) is empty

  • Status (install_status) is not retired (7), stolen (8) or absent (100)

  • For cmdb_ci_vm_instances (and child class) CIs, we filter out those with Instantiates::Instantiated By or Virtualizes::Virtualized By relationships with cmdb_ci_server (or child class) CIs (which also meet the above criteria), to avoid duplicate counting of logical virtual servers that are represented by CIs of both classes

  • As of Paris Patch 9 and Quebec Patch 4, for cmdb_ci_virtualization_server (and child class) CIs, we filter out those with Runs On::Runs relationships with cmdb_ci_server (or child class) CIs (which also meet the above criteria), to avoid duplicate counting of virtualization host and operating system discovery patterns that create independent CIs for the same server

    • Note that when upgrading from a version/patch level prior to this change to a version/patch level with this change, there may be a noticeable decrease in subsequent daily counts

Daily counts also include entries of type Unknown, which are reflected as Unresolved Monitored Objects in the ITOM License à License Report list.

Metric?

In the daily counts, ITOM Health also factors in CIs of the effective licensable classes that are associated to MetricBase metrics.  These CIs are de-duplicated against the CIs returned in the Daily event count logic above.

Health Log Analytics?

If you purchase this subscription, consumption is reflected via ITOM Health. Consumption is based on log data and event and performance metrics, received from licensable resource types.

What is ITOM Visibility?

The ServiceNow® ITOM Visibility product consists of ServiceNow® Discovery, ServiceNow®Service Mapping, Certificate Inventory and Management, Service Graph Connectors, Multisource CMDB, and Firewall Audits and Reporting. Discovery and Service Mapping give you a unified, connected view of your entire IT network and the services that it supports.
In addition, Service Graph Connectors populate the CMDB by bringing in data from third-party monitoring and management systems. Multisource CMDB enables you to track how the CMDB contains various discovery sources at the CI attribute level. Use Certificate Inventory and Management to avoid service outages due to expired TLS certificates. Firewall Audits and Reporting helps you to discover and manage your firewall security policies to heighten the security awareness for firewall audits.
For licensing purposes, ITOM Visibility provides the CI count it discovers, both during horizontal and top-down discovery. It also reports CIs that the Service Graph Connectors populate the CMDB with. ITOM Visibility reports the count for CIs of the following CI categories: Servers, PaaS, and Containers.