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Getting Started: First-Run Walkthrough

Software Asset Management Guide
Introduction

Getting Started: First-Run Walkthrough

If you have just turned on SAM in xAssets, do these things in this order. Each step takes anywhere from 30 minutes to a day depending on the size of your environment, but skipping a step is what causes most "the numbers are wrong" support tickets.

1. Confirm Your Inventory Source Is Running and Up-to-Date

SAM only sees what your inventory feed delivers. xAssets supports several feeds, and many customers combine more than one for full coverage:

Source Notes
xAssets Network Discovery The standard agentless discovery shipped with xAssets. Strong general-purpose source.
SCCM (Microsoft Configuration Manager) Pulls software inventory from your existing SCCM deployment. Good fit where SCCM is already the system of record for desktops.
Tanium Pulls inventory from Tanium endpoints. Useful in environments where Tanium is the primary endpoint platform.
ServiceNow CMDB Reads from the CMDB. Useful where ServiceNow is the authoritative source of truth for assets and software.
Microsoft Intune Useful as a supplementary feed. xAssets does pull software titles from Intune, but Intune's software list can be incomplete — some titles routinely show in other feeds but not Intune. Combine Intune with another source rather than relying on it alone.

Before any compliance work:

  • Open Asset List and confirm assets have recent Date Last Audited values.
  • If the count of recently-audited assets is much lower than your expected estate size, fix the inventory feed first. See the IT Asset Management Guide for setting up each source.
  • If you are combining sources (e.g., SCCM for desktops, Network Discovery for servers, Intune as a supplementary), make sure each is current.

2. Confirm Recognition Is Up-to-Date

Open Licensing → License Dashboard → Licensing Calculation Steps and look at the Software Licenses missing Classification Data check. If it is non-zero, recognition data is stale or incomplete. See Software Updates.

If you have a high count of unrecognised software titles, submit them to xAssets before proceeding (see Unrecognized Software). Working with bad recognition data wastes the rest of your setup time.

3. Walk the Software Catalog

Open Licensing → Licensing Position — this is the catalog of software products with one row per product. For each product you intend to license:

You do not need to verify defining titles in this step — when discovery creates a recognised software title, the matching catalog entry is created with a defining title in place automatically.

If many entries are missing or have the wrong License Type, fix the catalog before importing licenses. See Software Catalog.

4. Pilot a License Import

Even if you have a 500-row spreadsheet of licenses ready to go, do not import the whole thing first. Take 10–20 representative rows that span:

  • Multiple manufacturers
  • Multiple license types (per-user, per-device, per-core)
  • At least one row with each lookup field populated (Location, Custodian, Cost Centre, Department, Supplier)

Run the pilot import (see Importing Licenses: Standard License Import). Check the batch job log for failures. If any rows fail, fix them and re-pilot before running the full file.

5. Run the First Full Calculation

After the pilot import succeeds and you import the rest:

  1. Open Licensing → Calculate Licensing Position.
  2. Set Start Date to the start of the current month and End Date to today.
  3. Run.
  4. Wait for the batch job to complete.

6. Review the Position

Open Licensing → Licensing Position. Sort by Outstanding Requirement descending. The top of the list is what most needs your attention.

For your first review:

  • Spot-check 3-5 products you know well — do the numbers look right?
  • Look at the Licensing Calculation Steps tab — are any data-quality checks non-zero?
  • For products with unexpected results, open them and check that the catalog entry's License Type and the licenses' types are what you expect.

If anything looks wrong, fix at the source (catalog, license records, recognition) and recalculate. Iterate until the position represents reality.

7. Schedule Recurring Calculation

Once the manual run produces a correct position, schedule it to run nightly. See Operations: Scheduling and Monitoring.

8. Establish a Routine

The bulk of SAM ongoing work is monthly compliance review and quarterly reclaim. See Daily Tasks for the recommended cadence.

When to Get Help

If after these steps your numbers still do not match expectation, the typical causes are:

  • Discovery is not finding all your assets (under-counting consumption)
  • Recognition database is stale (causing under-counting)
  • Catalog entries are using the wrong License Type (mis-counting)
  • Some licenses are not in the system yet (under-counting entitlement)

Each of these has its own dedicated chapter. If you cannot identify which it is from the data-quality checks, contact xAssets support with the batch job log from your most recent calculation.