This article is a list of resources for the ServiceNow Certified Implementation Specialist - Software Asset Management Exam.
I created this set of notes and practice questions while studying and passed on the first attempt. So, if you utilize this guide and study each part of it, you should be all set to ace your exam and get your SAM Certification!
A very important note: there are several Quizlets and 'exam dumps' online. All of the Quizlets and exam dumps share the same answers (most likely copied from each other), and they contain A TON of wrong answers.
I spent my first couple days studying them, only to realize that the answers did not match what the ServiceNow docs said. In this post, I've listed a large set of practice questions and they have the correct answers.
If you're studying for your ServiceNow SAM Exam, I highly advise you to use the practice questions in this article. Of course, I'd love for you to use Snowycode to study - but the real reason is that literally every other online resource (besides the docs) are a minefield of wrong answers.
You can also check out our exam guides for ITSM Implementation and Certified Application Developer (CAD) and Application Portfolio Management (APM).
If you're new to ServiceNow certifications, learn how to get certified in ServiceNow.
The guide will be structured in the following manner:
Note: the questions are in no specific order. If you're having trouble with a question or need more info, you'll probably be able to find that info in the Notes section. Ctrl+f what you're looking for and there may be additional notes on it
What are the 8 components of the Software Asset Lifecycle
Below is a compilation of the notes I took studying. They go somewhat in order with the course, but not completely. They cover almost all necessary topics, terms and definitions that you'll need for the exam.
Working in conjunction with other ServiceNow platform products, software license rights can be requested, procured, managed to software contracts, allocated to users or devices, and reclaimed. Software installations can be discovered, normalized, and reconciled to software products, models, entitlements and allocations to quickly identify the software license position.
Simply stated, Software Asset Management is the stewardship of software assets from planning through sunset
The goals of SAM are:
Key Terms
SAMP must be activated by ServiceNow personnel
After a plugin is active it cannot be disabled or deactivated. The functionality, however, may be hidden.
There are six modules within the SAM Professional Product.
Software Asset Workspace - started in Rome, better UI, com.sn_sam_workspace plugin
Master SAMP Plugin: com.sn_samp_master
By default, the ServiceNow administrator persona (admin role) is responsible for loading asset management data from integrations and discovery tools into SAM Pro.
Key Terms
Effective Software Asset Management requires good foundational data as well as data that identifies what software rights are owned and what software rights are in use.
What data needs to be tracked in SAM?
Example of a Software model:
Publisher: Microsoft
Product: Office 365
Version: 2008
Edition: Enterprise
Software Entitlements - provide software license details that define user rights. They play a part in your compliance position - like whether a user using a given software application has been correctly licensed to the application)
Entitlements are usually entered manually, but sometimes are integrated with procurement software.
Entitlement Import Template - a downloadable spreadsheet that makes it easy to import entitlements.
To get there in the Application Navigator: Software Asset > Licensing > Entitlement Import
Data is NOT required in every column
The Publisher Part Number is optional, yet recommended. If available, the import process will automate matching this Software Entitlement with the correct Software Model, creating it if it doesn’t already exist.
If you do not have the PPN, then the next four fields are mandatory (Publisher, Product, Version, and Edition)
Custom Part Numbers can be added to resolve an entitlement import error that occurs when a part number doesn’t exist in the software library.
Errors: There are three error statuses; Open, Fixed and Ignored.
Reconciliation runs WEEKLY through a scheduled job, but you can run it yourself also.
The Discovery Map (DMAP) links Discovery Models to Software Models
ServiceNow Discovery - enables you to create an accurate, up-to-date, single system of record for your IT infrastructure, both on-premsises and in public clouds.
Discovery automatically finds IP-enabled devices within your enterprise network and, using a combination of probes, sensors, and patterns in four phases discovers the CI components that make up the IT infrastructure (e.g., servers, network devices, printers, applications, and more).
It then provides a scheduled classification of the CI components and populates the CMDB with the detailed information it finds.
Note that both ServiceNow Discovery and Software Asset Management (SAM) Professional require separate licensing.
The normalization process compares the discovered publisher, product, and version detected against the ServiceNow repository of normalized values.
Software discovery models are created for all installed software products and are tied to software models via a discovery map or defined discovery conditions. (Software entitlements are related to software models and define license details, including rights to use.)
Reconciliation calculates the compliance status of software products with respect to discovered installations and defined software models and entitlements.
Software installations are discovered using discovery patterns
There are four discovery phases (SCIE):
Exploration is the phase where the software, running on the IP enabled device, is identified.
Discovery models are automatically created during discovery.
If a software discovery model is not found that matches the primary key, a new software discovery model is automatically created.
Note: If the Publisher and Product fields on the software model are empty, the values are automatically populated according to the discovery map assigned to the software model. Additionally, If the software discovery map has a lifecycle definition defined, those settings are automatically populated in the Software Product Lifecycles related list.
Software Normalization - ServiceNow SAM software normalization delivers a definitive inventory of discovered publishers, products and versions. This can be extremely helpful when preparing for a software audit.
SAM adds normalized Publisher, Product, and Version values to the discovery model. SAM then uses these normalized discovery models to reconcile installed software to the entitlements related to your software models
Normalization improves the accuracy and efficiency of reconciliation for your software entitlements.
Normalization is a key part of reconciliation, but don't try to make it perfect. Resist the urge to get fixated on hit rates, normalization is an intermediate reconciliation goal.
Discovery models are compared to ServiceNow's Software Content Library
Discovery Model Normalization Status
When Does Normalization Run?
Business Rule Create a Software Normalization executes before insert/update and normalizes discovery model using the exact match rules (samp_package_map, samp_product_map, cds_client_name).
Scheduled job Discovery Model Normalization (sysauto_script) runs daily.
Software license management (SLM) is a key component of the software asset lifecycle.
Its primary objective is to track, control, and reduce software costs, including costs associated with non-compliance findings during a software audit.
Software license management encompasses the people, processes, and technology used within an organization to monitor and control what software licenses the organization has and how those licenses are used.
Software Product - Used in combination with the publisher during discovery model normalization. You can add a custom product if a software product does not exist in the Software library.
Software Model - Used to organize software licenses in meaningful ways. They are associated to a defined product and the software model category
Software Suite - A group of related software products offered as one unit. The parent is the master model that represents the suite of software. It has one or more suite children.
Publisher Pack - Provides publisher specific licensing metrics for reconciliation and optimization to determine license compliance. When activated, results are displayed in a software publisher compliance dashboard.
Software License Metric - Set in software entitlements and used for software license reconciliation (e.g. reconcile based on users vs devices)
Client Access License (CAL) - A software license measured by the number of users or devices that can access a product.
Software Suite - groups related software together to provide them as a single offering to ensure accurate license counting.
Any software model can be a suite parent or a child. They can be a child of many models.
For example: Microsoft Word can be a child of both Microsoft Office Standard Edition and Microsoft Office Professional Edition
Suites have the ability to identify inference criteria. An inference percent defines what percent of the suite must be installed to be identified as a suite. This is only used
if the suite parent does not exist on the device.
Software models are kinda like the key that links your installs and discovery models to the entitlements.
Software license metrics are used for reconciliation to determine your compliance position
License metrics can be defined for users, devices, processors and cores
What license metrics are available is based on the metric group. Metric groups are either common or tied to a specific software publisher.
The ServiceNow Software Asset Management Professional product comes with six common license metrics:
The video demo in the course is great (link here)
These are specific metric groups that provide unique License Metrics for publishers like Adobe, Citrix, Microsoft etc. — specific add-ons that cater to those publisher’s license models
Example: Adobe Publisher Pack (com.sn_samp_adobe)
Publisher packs are available add-ons to Software Asset Management that provide the capability to manage software based on specific publishers’ license models. They aid in defining what data needs to be captured/discovered to ensure accurate measurement and reporting for compliance.
When publisher packs are activated, their license metrics become available for selection in entitlements. When reconciliation is run, identified installed software is compared to the metric group (publisher), license metric, and software model on entitlements. The results of this reconciliation populates the compliance dashboard for the software publish
Gives you access to Publisher Overview dashboard
CALs control the number of users or devices that can access a particular version of software. and allows users to access services on a commercial server. Although most client access licenses are based on individual installations, some are based on concurrent access.
For example: if access is purchased for 25 concurrent CALs, then the organization is only allowed to have 25 devices or users accessing the service concurrently.
If the pre-defined software license metrics do not account for an unusual metric, a custom software license metric can be created.
When the metric is applied to an entitlement it will function like all other metrics during reconciliation.
Note: The sam_admin role is required to read the custom metric script. The sam_developer role is required to create or modify a custom metric script.
Required fields are name and calculation script
Software Entitlements represent a point-in-time purchase of rights to use software.
When matched against installation and usage data, entitlements help determine compliance and control costs.
To maintain software compliancy, calculate software installations vs. entitlement rights.
Software entitlements define license details of purchased software, track licenses that have been allocated to users or systems, are associated with software models, and are stored in the [alm_license] table.
Entitlement attributes (just look at an entitlement record to see these in action)
Software license details are tracked in software entitlements including the following:
Key features of ServiceNow software entitlements
Some key features of ServiceNow software entitlements are display name is automatically generated based on related software model and the software entitlement asset tag, Software entitlements are also used for full and upgrade licenses, identifies the metric group and metric used to determine the number of rights used (e.g. per user vs. per device), and tracks rights purchased, active rights, and allocated rights.
Publisher Part Number (PPN) facilitates creation of entitlements by identifying whether a software model already exists or not. If the model exists: The software model field is automatically updated. If the model is for a suite, suite components are automatically added. If the model does not exist, a software model is automatically created for the entitlement.
Software allocations in ServiceNow’s Software Asset Management Professional product are records that grant one or many right(s), are identified on the entitlement record, and assigned to a user or device to use the software.
Below is an example of a user allocation (device allocation looks identical except Assigned to is Allocated to):
On a Software Entitlement record related list, you can see all of the allocation records for an entitlement (as shown below):
Entitlements that have available rights may be allocated to multiple users or devices.
Allocations identify a user or device that has one or more rights to use a software entitlement. Each entitlement will have multiple allocations, and each user or device can have multiple rights allocated to them.
Software entitlement rights may be allocated through the software request process (service catalog), the software remediation process (based on reconciliation), or updated directly on the entitlement record (either manually or through import).
User Allocations:
Device Allocations:
Software reconciliation is an automated process which calculates compliance based on how many rights are in use compared to the number of active rights that have been purchased. It keeps license positions accurate and up to date without manual calculations.
Discovery maps are a predefined set of conditions that determine which software discovery models get mapped to which software models. Purchased rights are only applied to software discovery models that meet the conditions defined in the discovery map. This matching is important for reconciliation. There are discovery maps provided within ServiceNow, or the condition information can instead be specified directly in the software model.
Software reconciliation is run as a scheduled job (default is weekly) but can be run on-demand for one or all software publishers and can be grouped by country, region, company, cost center, or department. For Oracle installed on VMware, you can choose to run reconciliation for Oracle Database from ESX level or Vcenter Cluster level.
When reconciliation is run, a list of reconciliation results is created that shows compliance status of software with respect to discovery and entitlements.
Users with the sam_admin role can run on-demand reconciliation; users with sam_user role can only view reconciliation results.
There are four tiers of reconciliation results:
A software product result for a licensable product is generated after reconciliation even if there are no software models defined for the product.
A software model results record is only created when a software model or entitlement exists for the product.
NOTE: Costs will only calculate for publishers, products, and models, if related entitlements have a cost identified.
Software product results
After reconciliation is run, the software product result displays information such as Software Model Results, Unlicensed Installs, Removal candidates, etc.
Sometimes a product result shows as Not Compliant, but the software model results shows as Compliant. This stems from installs associated with the product that did not map to software models.
License Workbench
The License Workbench (located by navigating Software Asset > Licensing > License Workbench) provides reconciliation results in a simplified view. It can be used to quickly identify compliance position by publisher and further drill down into compliance position for:
Note: The list of publishers in the navigation bar on the left is referred to as the Publisher workbench navigation tree.
True-up Cost - Estimated cost of remediating non-compliance
Over-licensed Amount - Estimated cost of rights not being used
Potential Savings - Estimated cost that can be saved by taking action on underutilized or incorrect consumption of licenses
Removal Candidates - Shows a list of identified software to be removed from the environment and provides the justification for removal
Unlicensed Subscriptions - only populated if the software product is a subscription
Unlicensed Installs - The list of software installations found in the environment, associated with the software model, that are not covered by software entitlements
Remediation Options - Shows the number of rights needed, the costs of those rights based on associated license metric, and available actions for attaining compliance
Now that you’ve learned how to manage and discover the data, you need to see how it can integrate with other parts of the platform and actually be put to use.
Software Asset Management in a silo often causes duplication of effort, unnecessary process complexity, and additional cost. By integrating with existing operational business processes, SAM gains process efficiencies, improved visibility, and significant time and cost savings.
The focus of the Operational Integration tier:
Common terms used in this section
Software License Contract
A contract is a binding agreement between two parties. Software contracts come in many forms and have many different sections and clauses. The most common types of software contracts that most companies want to manage are software licenses, software license bundles, subscriptions and software maintenance.
By capturing what contracts you have and associating them to your assets you have easy access to contract numbers, contract start and end dates, terms and conditions, renewal information, financial terms, and related documentation.
Software Spend
Software Spend Detection - The ServiceNow Software Spend Detection application enables you to track, analyze, and optimize IT software spending from imported financial data.
The overlapping software capability within Software Spend Detection enables you to gain visibility of redundant applications in your software portfolio to rationalize in-use applications, consolidate applications with similar functionality, reduce software costs with actionable spend data, and increase productivity and collaboration across the enterprise by simplifying the tech stack.
Plugin: (com.sn_sam_spend) - Software Asset Management - Spend Detection
Role needed to import financial data: sam_spend_import
Software Spend tables:
License Change Projection
Through an optional plugin, ServiceNow Change Management can be integrated with Software Asset Management. This integration provides Change Management with insight into the potential cost implications of changes to processing resources (CPU & CPU Core) for software licensed by processor.
License Change Projection
Source from existing available rights or create a purchase order to source from a vendor
Three types of catalogs support the request and procurement process:
Keep the following in mind when working with catalogs:
There are two options are available when sourcing a request:
Add allocation
If there are available rights, this option will allow the assigning of those rights:
Add purchase order
If the rights need to be purchased, this option will create a purchase order if the capability is available:
Purchase orders
Purchase orders have a record with the details and then the line items ordered. Purchase orders specify assets to order from a single vendor. The Procurement product lets you track a request that was ordered from the Service Catalog
Establish an accurate compliance position
Software remediation has three main goals:
These goals are achieved by reconciling what is owned to what is allocated for use and remediating issues.
Source internally - Use allocation
Source externally - Create a purchase order
The Remediation Options related list can be accessed on the Software Model Result record or from the License Workbench and provides a list of options available to become compliant, based on license metric results.
When software models are Not Compliant there are four remediation options available:
Asset Reclamation Request - basically just streamlines getting assets back from an employee that leaves the organization
Common terms used in this section
Maintaining software product lifecycle data manually is time consuming and challenging which often results in legacy software versions and editions persisting throughout the environment long past their end-of-life and/or end-of-support dates.
As part of the Software Asset Management Content Library, content such as publisher general availability and end-of-life dates will be provided for software models that have been assigned a discovery map where software lifecycle content is available. If a discovery map does not have software product lifecycle content associated to it, the SAM - Create lifecycles for a software model scheduled job is run weekly to generate new lifecycles for newly released content.
Downgrade and Upgrade Rights
Though the process of managing software downgrades and upgrades is not part of the software product lifecycle, it is a key activity required to ensure you remain operationally aligned to the lifecycle.
• Downgrading software is the process of purchasing license rights for one version of a software product but using an earlier version.
• Upgrading software is the process of purchasing license rights to one version and being allowed to use a newer version.
Table: Downgrade Rights [samp_dmpa_downgrade_model]
Use the Agent Client Collector application to collect software inventory and usage data for the Software Asset Management application.
It It helps discover software that is deployed on end users machines
An agent is useful in discovering software deployed on end user machines such as laptops as well as machines deployed on isolated networks that only allow outgoing data transmission. You do not need to keep track of login credentials or IP ranges, nor do you need to create a discovery schedule. The agent, along with other software, can be deployed via a deployment image and then it continuously performs discovery and sends data back to your ServiceNow instance.
You can download the Agent Client Collector application from the ServiceNow Store.
Software entitlements with and Agreement type of Generic cannot be used for downgrade rights
Downgrading is more common than upgrading
Installation Optimization is about knowing what license rights are installed, who’s using them, and reclaiming unused or unauthorized software.
Software usage provides monthly aggregate information on who’s using what software, when it was last used, how many times it has been accessed, and the total time (in seconds) that it has been used.
Whenever possible, usage records should be populated automatically. They can be imported using a Microsoft SCCM integration.
Removal Candidates
Software Reclamation Rules
Software reclamation rules are used to aggregate usage data and define length of time a software must be unused in order to become a reclamation candidate.
User notification can be configured, to inform the user when they are flagged as a candidate. This is to provide them time to get authorization to keep the software installation. If there is no response, within a defined number of days, automatic reclamation occurs.
ServiceNow’s Client Software Distribution (CSD) product is used to remove/reclaim software.
For Software Asset Management, ServiceNow’s Client Software Distribution (CSD) product facilitates the removal of software without any user interaction. Using Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) a scheduled job revokes unentitled software and reclaims license rights. Utilizing this capability does not require that the software to be removed was installed by SCCM.
Although the full CSD product allows administrators to distribute, manage, and revoke software/reclaim license rights through automation, only the revocation/reclamation capability is entitled as part of Software Asset Management. Full use of CSD requires the Orchestration - Client Software Distribution plugin (com.snc.orchestration.client_sf_distribution), which is available by request with a subscription to ServiceNow’s Orchestration product.
Software Lifecycle Report
Using end-of-support or end-of-life software no longer supported by a publisher exposes your organization to the risk of security threats. Since the New York release, you can use the Software Lifecycle Report to products nearing end-of-life, end-of-support, and end-of-extended support. Use the information to mitigate risk to your organization with remediation actions such as buying extended support, planning for software upgrade, or software removal.
Note: Since Orlando, the Software Lifecycle report is enhanced to prioritize any publisher life-cycle information entered by the user over life cycle information provided by the software library.
For Software Asset Management preconfigured dashboards, indicators, and other configuration records are available through Performance Analytics Premium for Software Asset Management plugin (com.snc.pa.premium.sam) which is activated when Software Asset Management Professional plugin is activated.
Common terms used in this section
Report – data summary describing a process at a point in time.
Analytics – a series of measurements collected over time to provide historical trends of a process and potential future projections based on those historical trends.
Operational reporting: Provides real-time status updates. Example: How many software licenses does each department have right now? Provides summary of past information. Example: How many software licenses did each department have at this time last year?
Performance Analytics: Provides trending information for processes so that action can be taken as soon as performance degradation is detected. Example: What is my weekly trend of software models out of compliance for the last month? Also provides correlation of multiple business processes and uses analytics for maximum process insight. Example: What is the percentage of software models out of compliance in the past month?
Performance Analytics part 2 - ServiceNow Performance Analytics allows users to visualize data that is collected and aggregated over time. This data reveals trends which can be used to make real-time adjustments and improve how business functions. It can be used to align resources, systems, and employees to strategic objectives and priorities.
Use Cases for PA with SAM:
• Being able to identify that a certain software is being used less often (reduced over time) may indicate a need to look at potential over-license conditions.
• Being able to identify that a certain software is being used much more often (increased over time) may indicate a need to look at renegotiating contracts to get better pricing for anticipated demand.
Although Performance Analytics for SAM is available as part of the SAM Professional licensing, additional licensing is required if you want to use Performance Analytics for other ServiceNow products.
The Software Asset Analytics dashboard tab is accessed by navigating to Software Asset > Overview
The software Publisher Overview dashboards are accessed by navigating to Software Asset > Publisher Overview.
We will now explore a couple of the SAM subscription dashboards available.
The Office 365 and Adobe Cloud dashboard is accessible by navigating to Software Asset > Office 365 & Adobe Cloud. Click an element within a report to see more information or add and move widgets as needed.
You can view subscription information by specific Subscription Software Models or on a specific Subscription Publisher.
The Engineering License Manager application provides visibility into license usage for engineering software applications from publishers such as AutoCAD and ESRI via an integration with OpenLM. Navigate Software Asset > Engineering License Overview.
Note: Engineering applications is a broad term used to categorize software products that are used in industries such as aerospace, oil and gas, and construction.
Required Plugin: Software Asset Management Professional for Engineering Applications (com.sn_samp_eng_app).
Integrate with Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD) to view software usage for all connected SSO applications.
A single integration point to Okta to download applications, users, and user groups.
Baseline connection to Okta to provide additional usage data for Single Sign On (SSO) applications within the Okta.
This helps to integrate with different applications you have within Okta, and you can pull in the total number of users w/access to those applications along with their last login dates. Then based on that usage data, you can automatically reclaim or revoke access for that user.
Bring you own license (BYOL) support allows you to determine the compliance of Microsoft products such as Windows Server and SQL Server across hybrid infrastructures.
The vendor catalog is a list of goods available from different vendors.
An accurate and complete vendor catalog can make it easier to keep items in stock at the best possible price.
You can link multiple vendor catalog items to a single product catalog item, which allows you to track information about a single item at different vendors.
For example, for an iPhone 5 product catalog item, you can create separate vendor catalog items from Apple and from Amazon. Select the vendor with the best price when you source an item. Users need the model_manager role to work with vendor catalog items.
This concludes the study guide and notes. Good luck on your exam! Feel free to email us at servicenowresource@gmail.com to discuss the exam, updates to this guide, or anything else!
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