SaaS Management

Exciting new product family capabilities for Adobe Creative Cloud

SaaS Management on Snow Atlas now lets you filter for related products within Adobe’s family of applications and subscriptions.

 IT/ITAM Managers can:

• Easily query Adobe and its sub-products to understand the usage and optimize costs (e.g. aggregated view of Adobe Creative Cloud or down to applications such as Photoshop, InDesign, Acrobat, etc.).
• Quickly see charts with application and subscription KPIs such as purchased or free, unassigned or over assigned, usage and costs, active, inactive, have no activity, or not monitored across the last 12 months or 30 days.

IT, Finance, and Procurement Managers can make faster, better decisions around costs, app rationalization, and vendor negotiation.

Improvements to applications tables for better SaaS management 

We’ve updated the SaaS Management applications page to include more granular details to help you gain more visibility into your SaaS estate and optimize your spend.

We’ve added new data, such as:

• Discovery date: This information displays the date when the application was first discovered in your SaaS estate, allowing you to focus on the most recently discovered applications.
• Active users: This information displays the number of users that used this application in the last 30 days, allowing you to track its usage.

Cloud Capabilities

Cloud License Management: Key features added to improve your Azure Hybrid Benefit’s (BYOL) usage

In your cloud license management (CLM) dashboard, you can now see:

• Potential savings in licensing costs if all eligible resources (VMs) are converted to bring-your-own-licenses (BYOL) (Azure Hybrid Benefit).
• The realized savings from your existing BYOL configured resources. We can do this as we have exposed the price for Windows Server licenses in a BYOL and pay-as-you-go (PAYG) configuration in the Snow Atlas UI.
• The number of Windows Server licenses required for BYOL-eligible resources. By automatically calculating the license requirement, you can now quickly confirm that licenses are correctly applied while simultaneously optimizing costs.

Refer to the documentation here.

We have more enhancements lined up for March. As a Snow Atlas customer, we invite you to join the beta program for this application. Speak to your account manager to get started.

Access Snow Cloud Cost application using single sign-on (SSO)

Snow Atlas customers with a Snow Cloud Cost subscription can now access this application directly from the Snow Atlas UI using SSO. To enable this, configure your access on the Snow Cloud Cost page in the Snow Atlas settings. You only need your client ID and the name of your identity provider for Snow Cloud Cost to set this up. Follow the instructions here.

Snow Cloud Cost

New anomaly detection features

We introduce two impactful features that elevate the anomaly detection experience: root cause presentation and anomaly graph visualization along with the anomaly baseline.

With our new root cause presentation feature, you gain deeper insights into the factors contributing to anomalies in your data.

Revamped budget page

Introducing an enhanced look and upgraded capabilities to elevate your cost management, you can now:

• Budget 6 months daily and monthly granularity forecast presentation.
• Easily create budgets based on amortized/net amortized/unblended costs.
• You can now configure your budget setting with all available Cost and Usage filters.
• Seamlessly browse between monthly and daily views along with a detailed table.
• The triggered budget alert is now visible on the budget level.
• New and informative budget alert email.
• Save the budget chart and information as a dashboard panel.

For more information review our documentation. Note: This option is not available for EA accounts.

What’s next?

We have more product updates and innovations coming. Subscribe to our blog, so you don’t miss a thing. 

Not a customer yet? Schedule a demo of Snow to see the power of Technology Intelligence. 

The post What’s New at Snow Software: February 2024 appeared first on Snow Software.

Batch editing of agreements and agreement filtering

In response to customer feedback, Snow has released (in Snow License Manager v9.33) the enhancement to edit multiple agreements of the same type at once from the Agreements page. Snow has also improved the filtering options on the Agreement list page, and now all columns can be filtered. Additionally, we’ve added three new columns to the Column Selector that you can filter. These include:

• Valid from (date)
• Valid to (date)
• Active (yes/no)

SaaS Management

Improved home page

We’ve updated the organization of information on the SaaS Management home page, so that it’s easier for users to find the information most relevant to them.

The Overview tab includes key performance indicators and trends for your subscriptions, including:

• The count of all your SaaS subscription types
• Your monthly cost of all subscriptions
• Your monthly potential savings across all your SaaS subscriptions
• The number of SaaS subscriptions expiring in the next 60 days to help you manage your SaaS renewals
• A timeline showing your top 5 upcoming renewal term costs by vendor

The Get Started tab helps users quickly find new and existing value with their SaaS Management solution:

• Guidance to key areas of value
• Embedded videos
• Links to key information and documentation

The News tab highlights new releases and capabilities within SaaS Management.

Improved subscription family view

The Insights tab helps users see potential cost savings across SaaS subscriptions:

• Users can select the insights to see only the list of the users that can be optimized
• A dynamic table allows the user to view more than one insight on the dashboard

The Users tab presents user-based information relating to the SaaS subscription family:

• KPIs highlight the total number of users in the family and the total number of active, inactive, and never active users
• A dynamic table shows users of that subscription family with pertinent details like department, monthly cost, and potential savings per user, among others

What’s next?

We have more product updates and innovations coming. Subscribe to our blog, so you don’t miss a thing. 

Not a customer yet? Schedule a demo of Snow to see the power of Technology Intelligence. 

The post What’s New at Snow Software: January 2024 appeared first on Snow Software.

• Creating IT asset visibility across the enterprise 
• Public cloud visibility and cost optimization 
• SAP license management 

Innovation area: Enterprise-wide asset visibility, insights and risk mitigation

ITAM for end-user computing 

Do more with Snow Agents with a new package builder feature 

Get more from your Snow Agents and add files and scripts using this new capability in the Snow Agent Package Builder. This feature is available in Snow Atlas and is in early access for on-premises Snow License Manager customers. 

Additionally, the Snow Agents team has improved agent documentation including agent default behavior and a change log. The new documentation repository for agents can be found on GitHub. 

SAM on Snow Atlas: Bulk archive and delete of computers 

We’ve improved the customer workflow and made it easier to manage your computers in SAM on Snow Atlas with the ability to archive and delete computers in bulk. 

We heard from users that the process for archiving and deleting computers was tedious and time-consuming, requiring users to select and edit computers one-by-one. 

With this new release, users can save time and improve productivity with the ability to edit computers in larger quantities. 

SaaS Management 

New: Recommended actions 

Within SaaS Management on Snow Atlas, we’ve organized the homepage to make it easier for users to know what to do to get more value from their Snow solution. The page is structured with a status page and recommendations, details on how to get started, and an overview of what is new. 

• Recommended actions highlights to-do actions within the system, including missing items such as billing, connectors, configurations and subscription-related metrics. 
• Get started – offers users help on how to configure and set up for maximum value. 
• News – summarizes our latest features and enhancements that are regularly released. 

We’ll be continually enhancing the user experience, so check back here for future updates! 

New product family view for Microsoft 365 

SaaS Management on Snow Atlas is one of the first to allow users to filter by product families and related products within the family of applications and subscriptions.    

Customers can now see a holistic view of not only all their Microsoft 365 subscriptions but also key insights to optimize their Microsoft investment (e.g. aggregated view of the Microsoft 365 offering that bundles all the applications such as Visio, Project, Microsoft Office, etc.).   

Users can review assignments and activity across multiple Microsoft 365 license types in one place to support optimization efforts. Other KPIs include purchased and free, unassigned and over-assigned; approved and unauthorized; usage and costs; active, inactive, and no activity; monitored and unmonitored.  

These metrics help you control shadow SaaS, keep the IT environment more secure, and properly allocate costs across business units. 

SAP license management 

Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software: Latest version provides even greater compliance, optimization, and automation  

Besides becoming certified once again by SAP, Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software’s newest release—version 4.0—provides Snow customers with even more control over their SAP license management. Here are some highlights: 

• Compliance: 8,000+ embedded products provide easier contract management possibilities. 
• Optimization: Two new STAR License Intelligence rule set updates help customers stay current with recent SAP changes. 
• Automation: Customers can always rely on the latest Snow release to keep them automatically up to date, as we stay certified and current to frequent changes from SAP, such as pricing condition lists. 

For more news related to version 4.0 of Snow Optimizer for SAP® Software, please see the Release Notes and view the video below: 

Innovation area: Cloud management capabilities 

CostGPT – AI tool on Snow Cloud Cost 

Snow Cloud Cost customers now have access to an AI tool called CostGPT across the platform. You can talk to CostGPT, ask it questions about your cloud cost, and in return, it provides you with personalized insights and visualizations, all in just a few seconds. 

Here are some key benefits of using CostGPT: 

• Simplicity: Users can ask questions about their cloud costs in chat. For instance, “How much have I spent on Amazon in last three years?” Users can also ask more specific queries like “What percentage of my EBS storage is gp3?” The tool will analyze cloud accounts and provide the requested insights. 
• Actionable insights: CostGPT offers insights to optimize cloud costs and suggests additional questions and commands to understand cloud spending better. 
• Proactive decision-making: CostGPT enables organizations to make informed decisions on cloud resource allocation and spending based on search data. This prevents unnecessary costs and optimizes resource utilization. 
• Real-time data visualizations: CostGPT provides visualizations for exploring and analyzing cloud costs. This helps our users make informed decisions and plan expenditure patterns. 

We recognize the challenges of managing cloud costs and the need for multicloud visibility. With CostGPT, users can effortlessly understand their cloud costs instantly. 

What’s next?  

We have more product updates and innovations coming. Subscribe to our blog, so you don’t miss a thing. 

Not a customer yet? Schedule a demo of Snow to see the power of Technology Intelligence. 

The post What’s New at Snow Software: December 2023 appeared first on Snow Software.

• Creating IT asset visibility across the enterprise
• Public cloud visibility and cost optimization
• Working with ITAM partners

Innovation area: Enterprise-wide asset visibility, insights and risk mitigation

New UK Snow Atlas datacenter

In response to public sector customer feedback for data residency in the UK, Snow has invested in an UK datacenter. Snow Atlas customers now have four options to store their technology intelligence data: UK, Netherlands, United States and Australia. 

ITAM for end-user computing

Snow ITSM Enhancer: Greater control via extended data in updated ServiceNow apps

Version 4.3 of our certified ServiceNow apps for Snow ITSM Enhancer are now published. In short, ServiceNow tables have been extended to include the following out-of-the-box data:

• Software lifecycle dates: End of life (EOL), end of support (EOS), and end of extended support (EOES)
• Application data: Allowlisting and denylisting

This extra data provides service desk personnel with even more control, helping them to serve their internal stakeholders better by resolving support tickets faster than before.

These two upgraded apps are compatible with the latest ServiceNow Vancouver release:

SaaS management

New ServiceNow connector

We are excited to announce our newest connector to track and monitor ServiceNow, now joining our other 23,000 discovered applications in Snow SaaS Management. Many of Snow’s customers are well-acquainted with ServiceNow, the leading IT Service Management tool and one of the biggest SaaS spend line items for an organization. 

The connector identifies stale or inactive users, show related costs and insights to identify potential savings. The connector displays: 

• User information (name, email, department, country)
• User activity (user’s last login to ServiceNow)

We will continue to build more capabilities that expand your understanding of usage and licensing across ServiceNow’s modules. Features coming soon include license information (license plans, assigned license plan per user) and insights to optimize your ServiceNow licenses. Additionally, organizations will be able to identify users provisioned with the role of “Approver”, a more expensive license, and identify inactive users and unused licenses to further control costs.

Test drive the ServiceNow connector now by reaching out to your Snow Software account manager.

New SaaS subscription trends

Managers can quickly see charts with the most important KPIs — assignment and activity information for the product family. Within these KPIs, you can dig deeper into purchased or free, unassigned or over-assigned, usage and costs related to subscriptions as well as whether they are active, inactive, have no activity, or not monitored across the last 12 months or 30 days.

Unique SaaS product family grouping

SaaS Management on Snow Atlas is one of the first to offer this exciting feature that filters related products within a family of applications and subscriptions.

IT/ITAM/Finance/Procurement Managers can:

• Easily query these brand families to understand the usage and optimize costs for the family or sub-applications (e.g. aggregated view of the Microsoft 365 offering that bundles all the applications such as Visio, Project, Microsoft Office, etc.).
• Quickly see charts with application and subscription KPIs such as purchased or free, unassigned or over assigned, usage and costs, active, inactive, have no activity, or not monitored across the last 12 months or 30 days.
• User-centric filtering shows only relevant provisioned users and respective monthly subscription costs that can be aggregated at the Microsoft family level.

Managers can make faster, better decisions around costs, application rationalization and vendor negotiation.

Datacenter computing

Snow Atlas now verified for Oracle Java SE

Snow is pleased that both Snow Atlas and our on-premises SAM offerings have Oracle Verification for Oracle Databases, Oracle Middleware and Oracle Java SE. This new functionality allows Snow Atlas users to generate a .zip file that contains information about the estates where Oracle databases, middleware and Java products are found. This capability helps users quickly respond to audit requests with confidence of accurate data.

Improved data sharing for Oracle verified data

Responding to customer feedback, Snow has made it easier (in Snow License Manager v9.31.2) to share Oracle data with third parties and now computers with incomplete verified data can be exported in PDF or CSV format with all relevant details included. For Oracle verified data, customers can generate a .zip file.

Innovation area: Snow Labs

Snow Atlas Generative AI Assistant – Snow Copilot

Snow Labs is a multiprong innovation initiative to help organizations make better decisions and deliver positive business outcomes with Technology Intelligence, or the ability to understand and manage all technology data, via Snow Atlas.

One of the first innovations developed under this team is Snow Co-Pilot, an AI assistant that leverages the Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. It allows customers to input questions and receive insights on their computer data, such as “How many computers have been installed in the last 90 days?” as well as explore “what if” scenarios all directly within Snow Atlas. Snow Copilot reduces the need to export data into PowerBI or Excel to get insights into advanced questions on forecasting, asset allocation, and trend identification of SAM computer data.

Snow Copilot and other AI innovations will be available for current Snow Atlas customers who enroll in the beta program. Reach out to your Snow Account Manager to become enrolled in the beta program.

What’s next?

We have more product updates and innovations coming. Subscribe to our blog, so you don’t miss a thing. Not a customer yet? Schedule a demo of Snow to see the power of Technology Intelligence.

The post What’s New at Snow Software: November 2023 appeared first on Snow Software.

In this month’s innovation blog, we’ll show you how we’re bringing Technology Intelligence to life through a selection of new and enhanced portfolio capabilities Snow introduced to the market during the first three quarters of 2023. These product capabilities provide a quick glimpse into innovations in the areas of:

• Creating IT asset visibility across the enterprise
• Public cloud visibility and cost optimization
• Working with ITAM partners

Innovation area: Enterprise-wide asset visibility, insights and risk mitigation

ITAM usage and spend optimization is Snow’s flagship domain, and we continue to offer significant new and enhanced capabilities here—especially on Snow Atlas, our cloud-native platform. The following is just a small taste of what we’ve been up to with our ITAM offerings so far in 2023.

ITAM for end-user computing

Container visibility now illuminates previous blind spots in your commercial software compliance position

Containers are isolated and dynamic environments. This makes gathering information about how they are being used or the software and applications residing in them extremely inefficient using technologies such as agents. As a result, software asset managers risk having a real blind spot in calculating their effective compliance position for commercial applications running in these environments.

To help software asset management (SAM) pros mitigate this risk, Snow Spend Optimizer on Snow Atlas provides visibility to software running in Kubernetes environments by:

• Scanning the container environment to identify commercial products that need a license. This entails scanning for commercial applications in standard, non-modified containers for Microsoft, RedHat and Oracle.
• Providing details on what license type is required for compliance. SAM pros need historical insight on when applications were deployed (start/end times) within containerized environments in order to know when a compliance vulnerability may have originated.

Currently supported environments: Kubernetes on-premises, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Google Kubernetes Service and OpenShift.

SaaS management

Early this year, we announced the launch of Snow SaaS Management. As SaaS expenditures continue to accelerate and decentralize, so do the costs and risks associated with shadow SaaS. ChatGPT is no exception, as we highlight below.

Manage SaaS risks by discovering usage of AI tools like ChatGPT

AI tools such as ChatGPT exploded onto the scene in 2023, and our customers are rightly concerned about the use of such technology in their organizations. Earlier this year, Snow highlighted the opportunities and risks associated with these large language model tools.

To help customers mitigate such risks, Snow added a new category—artificial intelligence—to our list of application types, so that customers can quickly identify when these tools are being used. From there, they can identify who is using these tools and remediate as needed.

Our browser-based discovery of SaaS usage makes it uniquely positioned to provide data on free and trial software such as ChatGPT. Unlike other SaaS management solutions that rely primarily on expense data to determine which SaaS applications might be in use, our discovery methodology quickly and automatically identifies usage of ChatGPT and similar AI applications.

For a deep dive into this topic, view our on-demand webinar to better understand how ChatGPT and tools like it could potentially impact your organization and what you can do about it.

Datacenter computing

Oracle: Triple verification of Snow gives customers increased control, speed and efficiency

When data regarding Oracle product deployment and usage must be identified in an organization’s IT environment (such as for a software audit or advisory project), Oracle uses their own in-house tooling to gather this data, which most often happens via their own License Management Services (LMS) consultants. This is an on-site process where Oracle LMS personnel run tooling scripts manually, server by server. This complex process impacts customer access to their production systems, possibly during office hours, which could require the alignment of several teams across many regions and time zones.

As an alternative, Oracle awards qualifying third-party vendors with official verification status to access Oracle deployment and usage data themselves. However, Oracle sets the bar extremely high for their verified third-party tool vendors because these vendors’ solutions must provide information that Oracle themselves will accept.

Snow Software is one of only a handful of global vendors verified for all three programs set up by Oracle:

• Oracle Database and Database Options
• Oracle Fusion Middleware
• Java SE

While Snow reached the first verification milestone in 2022, we’ve added the second and third in 2023.

So, what benefits and business value do these Oracle verifications give Snow customers?

• Complete visibility: Detection and reporting on exactly which Oracle features and functionality are switched on and being used.
• Increased control: Customers can get this data whenever they want (not being at the mercy of a scheduled Oracle LMS visit, with its resulting downtime).
• Greater speed and efficiency: From the Snow product interface, the verified data is speedily exported in the Oracle-verified format for the entire datacenter with the literal click of a button.
• License optimization incentive when preparing for audit/advisory projects: Customers get chances to oversee and optimize their Oracle estate as often as they prefer prior to a compelling Oracle event.

For more information on these Oracle management capabilities from Snow, check out the videos below.

Innovation area: Cloud management capabilities

Many new and improved cloud financial management capabilities have been added in 2023, including managing OpEx charge rates over time, Kubernetes cluster asset cost visibility, new cost & usage explorer dashboard, managing Azure costs with our virtual machines usage dashboard, and more. Let’s highlight a few enhancements for managing your AWS spend.

Snow Cloud Cost: New S3 recommendations for better cost efficiency

Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) is among the most extensively used AWS services. Recent enhancements to the Snow Cloud Cost recommendations engine for Amazon S3 include:

• S3 multipart uploads: Identifies unfinished S3 multipart uploads that are still incurring storage costs and consuming your space. This recommendation allows you to decide if you’d like it to be completed or cleaned up.
• S3 versioning: Identifies S3 buckets that have versioning enabled but do not have lifecycle rules defined to manage older version of your files. This helps you to implement lifecycle rules to expire or transition older version of files to reduce storage costs.
• S3 storage class: Identifies S3 buckets that are currently using the standard storage class or low-access storage class. This enables you to migrate data to more cost effective storage classes such as intelligent tiering for infrequently accessed data.

Innovation area: Partner management capabilities

Our new and improved Snow Partner Program went live mid-year in 2023. To provide context, the Snow partner ecosystem comprises a diverse array of resellers, managed service providers (MSP), global systems integrators, independent software vendors and more. These partners enhance and scale our offerings to customers around the world. Some quick examples of the ways that Snow has supported our partner ecosystem with new and enhanced portfolio capabilities this year include improved Snow Atlas partner console customer environment visibility & security, faster troubleshooting of customers’ IT environments and support for customer cloud cost optimization. Let’s expand on this partner support by rounding off this Technology Intelligence roundup through a closer look at the following two capabilities.

Managed service providers: Improved protection and service through customer system access

For Snow partners who manage their customers’ SAM environments (customers buy through a partner and grant full access to the partner), administrators can now very quickly see the specific customer systems they can sign into and access.

MSP administrators with such full control can also extend or prevent access to other users, allowing partners to identify gaps in servicing their customers, as well as prevent any unauthorized access to the customer systems.

Customer application management: Improved security and cost optimization

From the Customers overview page, Snow partners are now able to compare and prioritize high-value metrics across all their customers’ applications.

For example, they can quickly identify customers whose IT environments contain a specific number of installed yet prohibited (aka “denied”) applications. In the same way, partners can easily see which customers have applications with the following support statuses: end of support (EOS), end of extended support (EOES) or end of life (EOL).

As you can see in the bottom part of the screenshot above, the partner drills into the customer environment in question to then carry out established policies for handling these risky applications (in this example, 50 installations on Acrobat Professional 2017 reached EOS over a year ago).

And when it comes to optimizing application costs, Snow partners can also use these same views to immediately identify and uncover details regarding customers’ used and unused applications, acting accordingly to handle non-optimized applications or remove wasted software spend.

What’s next?

We have more product updates and innovations coming. Subscribe to our blog, so you don’t miss a thing.

Not a customer yet? Schedule a demo of Snow to see the power of Technology Intelligence.

The post What’s New at Snow Software: 2023 Technology Intelligence Roundup appeared first on Snow Software.

New partner capabilities

Customer application management: Improved security and cost optimization

From the Customers overview page, Snow partners are now able to compare and prioritize high-value metrics across all their customers’ applications.

For example, they can quickly identify customers whose IT environments contain a specific number of installed yet prohibited (aka “denied”) applications. In the same way, partners can easily see which customers have applications with the following support statuses: end of support (EOS), end of extended support (EOES) or end of life (EOL).

As you can see in the bottom part of the screenshot above, the partner drills into the customer environment in question to then carry out established policies for handling these risky applications (in this example, 50 installations on Acrobat Professional 2017 reached EOS over a year ago).

And when it comes to optimizing application costs, Snow partners can also use these same views to immediately identify and uncover details regarding customers’ used and unused applications, acting accordingly to reduce provisioned licenses, and rightsize license entitlements with vendors based on actual usage.

New SAM capabilities

ITSM Enhancer for ServiceNow: Significant performance improvements

With Snow ITSM Enhancer for ServiceNow, customers can now gain greatly improved performance through implementing indexes.

This improved performance is realized in the form of faster processing and aggregation of Snow SAM data into ServiceNow. Implementing indexes provides the most benefits for ITSM Enhancer for ServiceNow environments from approximately 30,000 to 70,000 devices.

Learn how to use the ServiceNow Guided Setup steps to create performance-increasing indexes in our Snow Globe knowledge base article, How to implement Snow for ServiceNow performance improvements. To access Snow Globe articles, you can create a user account here for free.

SAM on Snow Atlas

Proactive data governance with computer properties filtering

As a SaaS platform, Snow Atlas is continually updated with incremental value. You can follow these frequently communicated new and enhanced capabilities through Snow’s community public broadcast page, Snow Atlas Releases.

One such example of a small but powerful, quick update is the recently released Computers list filtering capability, which allows you to inspect the current situation of computers in your IT landscape.

Has a laptop, datacenter server or virtual machine unexpectedly reported back as having Inactive status? Are computers being scanned in the time intervals you’re expecting? Just choose a column to filter to the property you’re most interested in; then, take appropriate action on the resulting filtered computer list, if necessary.

Oracle: Even better, more complete visibility of your Java installations

Detection of Java installations across your entire IT landscape can be tricky. Snow is a pioneer in this area, having first provided this capability two years ago, with continued enhancements all along the way.

Fast forward to the late summer of 2023, and Snow keeps adding incremental innovation, this time in the form of our enhanced All Java installations report on Snow Atlas.

This report’s value has increased significantly through the addition of the following new columns: Architecture, Installation status, Home path, Reason message, plus a host of others located in our new column selector.

New SaaS Management capabilities

Improved SaaS data source: Browser extension

Increasing SaaS sprawl in organizations is driving a lack of visibility, wasted spend, and heightened security & regulatory risks. To combat this, Snow SaaS Management provides consolidated SaaS application usage and cost data visibility, thanks to several discovery sources.

One of these SaaS data discovery sources is unique to Snow: Using a web browser extension to discover both known and unknown applications accessed from within your IT landscape, including free and trial SaaS apps. The browser extension also discovers individual SaaS activity, detailed down to the number of hours and minutes users have spent logged into such SaaS apps. This is key information for you to know when it comes to your security and software renewal processes.

Our most recent news is that this secure, powerful browser extension uses an innovative data collection method that does not depend on an agent. This allows customers to benefit from a standalone SaaS management solution if desired, without any other product dependencies.

New Cloud Cost management capabilities

Snow Cloud Cost: New S3 recommendations for better cost efficiency

Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) is among the most extensively used AWS services today. Take advantage of the following new enhancements to the Snow Cloud Cost recommendations engine to maximize your ROI on Amazon S3:

• S3 multipart uploads: Identifies unfinished S3 multipart uploads that are still incurring storage costs and consuming your space. This recommendation allows you to decide if you’d like it to be completed or cleaned up.
• S3 versioning: Identifies S3 buckets that have versioning enabled but do not have lifecycle rules defined to manage older version of your files. This helps you to implement lifecycle rules to expire or transition older version of files to reduce storage costs.
• S3 storage class: Identifies S3 buckets that are currently using the standard storage class or low-access storage class. This enables you to migrate data to more cost effective storage classes such as intelligent tiering for infrequently accessed data.

What’s next?

We have more product updates and innovations coming. Subscribe to our blog, so you don’t miss a thing.

Not a customer yet? Schedule a demo of Snow to see the power of Technology Intelligence.

The post What’s New at Snow Software: September 2023 appeared first on Snow Software.

Cutting-edge anomaly detection (public beta)

With Snow Cloud Cost, now you can uncover hidden cost inefficiencies and optimize financial performance. The anomaly detection capability marks a significant advancement in cost data analysis and financial management. By automating the detection of cost irregularities, you can:

• Proactively identify inefficiencies
• Prevent revenue leakage
• Unlock opportunities for cost optimization

The anomaly detection monitoring provides an overview of anomalies and anomaly alerts, enabling users to view historical alerts/anomalies and trends, in addition to exporting the data into CSV.

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Prometheus agent (public beta)

The Prometheus agent will enable us to ingest metrics from your Kubernetes clusters more efficiently and will only scrape metrics from a predefined set provided as part of the installation. The agent can be further customized according to your individual business requirements.

• The agent queries the data on an hourly basis by default (the interval is configurable).
• Queries execute in batches and aggregate the hourly metrics data.
• The agent can query data for multiple clusters from a single Prometheus or Thanos agent.

It’s now easier to track Kubernetes waste

Kubernetes (K8s) is an important area of focus for cloud financial management, and we’re committed to delivering best-in-class K8s FinOps features. Recent enhancements include:

• AWS, Azure, K8s cost & usage explorers: The cost breakdown table now displays CPU actual/waste and a memory actual/waste breakdown.
• AWS, GCP, Azure, K8s cost & usage Explorers: CPU/memory request metric has been replaced with the CPU/memory waste metric.
• AWS, K8s cost & usage explorers: Cost breakdown table data can be grouped by node group level.

Microsoft Azure virtual machine and storage cost breakdown report

Gain a comprehensive view of your Azure costs by seeing the total virtual machine (VM) cost and storage cost in a single dashboard. This holistic approach allows you to evaluate the overall impact of VMs and storage on your cloud expenses, enabling better cost optimization strategies.

Container visibility now available on Snow Atlas

Containers are isolated environments, which makes gathering information about how they’re being used or the software and applications residing in them extremely inefficient using traditional technologies (agents). As a result, software asset managers have a blind spot in calculating their effective compliance position for commercial applications running in these environments.

To help software asset management (SAM) pros solve this challenge, Snow released a new feature in Snow Spend Optimizer on Snow Atlas that provides visibility to software running in Kubernetes environments. Current supported environments include Kubernetes on-premises, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Google Kubernetes Service & OpenShift. 

The container visibility feature:

• Scans the container environment to identify if there are commercial products that need a license. This feature scans for commercial applications in standard containers for Microsoft, RedHat and Oracle. A standard container is a container that has been acquired from a repository of these vendors and has not been modified after that.
• Provides details on what kind of license is required to be compliant. SAM pros need some historical insight on when applications were deployed (start/end times) within containerized environments, so they know exactly when a compliance vulnerability may have started.

Snow Atlas webpage UI and performance updates

We recently released updates to the Snow Atlas pages for inventoried computers, the identified applications and license management. The new pages are fast, responsive and dynamically scalable for various screen sizes. Our performance tests show that search time has improved to find applications in just one second.

Improved Snow Atlas navigation

We love to hear from our customers and to learn  ways to improve our products. One piece of feedback we received from several customers was that moving the secondary menu to the left side led to some space constraints. To address this issue, we’ve made the secondary menu collapsible. This update is available to all Snow Atlas customers.

Managed service partners (MSPs) can see and control access to Snow Atlas

For Snow partners who manage their customers’ SAM environments (customers buy through a partner and grant full access to the partner), our latest release allows partner administrators to see which of their customer systems they can sign into and access.

For these MSP administrators with full control, they can also extend or prevent access to other users. These latest features allow partners to identify gaps in servicing their customers as well as prevent any unauthorized access to the customer systems.

What’s next?

The What’s New section on the Snow Atlas homepage will now include Snow Atlas release notes, so you can always stay on top of the latest innovations. We have more product updates and innovations coming across Snow, so be sure to subscribe to our blog, so you don’t miss a thing.

Not a customer yet? Schedule a demo of Snow to see the power of Technology Intelligence.

The post What’s New at Snow Software: July 2023 appeared first on Snow Software.

Enhancements to Snow SaaS Management

User-centric optimization, Salesforce and Microsoft^® 365 connector updates and new Microsoft 365 insights highlight this month’s Snow SaaS Management enhancements.

Identify top SaaS consumers to speed optimization

Snow SaaS Management now includes a column in the user table which calculates the total monthly cost of SaaS applications per user.

Sort the column to reveal the users with the highest SaaS spend, then drill down to each user for additional information, including:

• All applications in the user’s environment
• Monthly cost of each application
• How the application was discovered
• When the application was discovered
• When the user was last active in the application

Token-based authentication for Salesforce connector

The Snow SaaS Management API connector for Salesforce allows users to gather important licensing and user activity data regarding their Salesforce subscriptions. This data can fuel optimization efforts to ensure users are getting the most out of their Salesforce spend. When an account is MFA-enabled and the authentication is user-based, the data aggregation fails. To solve this problem, Snow now offers token-based authentication, enabling data aggregation after the user has entered the required credentials.

Domain name filtering option for Microsoft 365 and Azure AD connectors

Snow pulls critical data from vendor portals with our Microsoft 365 and Azure AD connectors, but when the data includes extraneous information such as guest users or non-real users, it clouds the picture. With the new domain name filtering option, only real users are pulled from the portals, allowing you to narrow your focus to the information that’s truly impactful to your subscriptions. 

Additional insights to fuel Microsoft 365 optimization

Matching users with the appropriate license tier is critical for Microsoft 365 optimization. Snow SaaS Management now offers insights to highlight when a user’s activity indicates the user could downgrade from an E3 to an E1 license or from an E5 to an E3 license. 

Web accessibility introduced for visually impaired users

Web accessibility is now introduced in Snow License Manager by adding readable labels to the user interface’s components. This means visually impaired users can now read the labels in the user interface by using screen reader technologies.

The web accessibility feature, disabled by default, is system-wide, which means that if you enable it, you enable it for all users in your system and all customers in your service provider edition (SPE) environment.

Automated insights for SAM on Snow Atlas

We are always looking for ways to reduce the manual effort required for common calculations found in reports. With that in mind, the SAM on Snow Atlas license tracking per computer report now includes an additional column that calculates total application cost (application cost per metric x license requirement).

Partners gain more visibility for faster troubleshooting of their customers’ IT environments

When partners log into Snow Atlas via their tenant, they will now see more details for diagnosing and troubleshooting their customers’ systems, including which customer computers are:

• Quarantined
• Inventoried
• Inactive

Partners can also see where hardware resides (physical, on-premises or cloud) and can sync data more than once per day to give customers the latest updates on the IT estate.

Improved cost allocation, deeper details on containers and additional savings recommendations in Snow Cloud Cost

Snow Cloud Cost added new capabilities for improved cost allocation, which enable you to:

• Define business units based on your Kubernetes resources with “Business Mapping for Kubernetes”.
• Assign costs to the right user profile with a split cost indication in business mapping filtering.

You can also view deeper detail on containers, including:

• Total virtual machine (VM) costs with Azure services report
• A separate breakdown of VM and storage costs with Azure services report
• A detailed Kubernetes view for AWS with CPU Actual & Waste and Memory Actual & Waste breakdowns

Benchmark against yourself on Azure memory consumption with new memory data points, including:

• Utilization graph
• Average used memory, average available memory, memory GB size and memory utilization

What’s next?

We have more product updates and innovations coming. Subscribe to our blog, so you don’t miss a thing.

Not a customer yet? Schedule a demo of Snow to see the power of Technology Intelligence.

The post What’s New at Snow Software: June 2023 appeared first on Snow Software.

Discover usage of AI tools such as ChatGPT

AI tools such as ChatGPT have exploded on the scene recently, and our customers are rightly concerned about the use of such tools in their organizations. A recent Snow Software blog highlighted the opportunities and risks associated with these large language model tools. 

To help customers manage the risks, Snow has added a new category – artificial intelligence – to the list of application types, so that customers can quickly identify when these tools are being used in their environments. From there they can identify who is using these tools and remediate as needed.

Snow Software’s browser-based discovery of SaaS usage makes it uniquely positioned to provide data on free and trial software such as ChatGPT. Unlike other SaaS management solutions that rely primarily on expense data to determine what SaaS applications might be in use, Snow’s discovery methodology quickly and automatically identifies usage of ChatGPT and similar AI applications.

Verification for Oracle^® Java SE

Snow is proud to announce that its on-premises datacenter management offering has been verified by the Oracle Global License Advisory Services (GLAS) program as a third-party tool vendor for Oracle Java SE. This is now the third of three possible Oracle verifications that Snow has achieved (including Oracle Fusion Middleware, plus Oracle Database and Database Options).

This new Java SE verification means Snow data is trusted by Oracle auditors. Software asset managers can be audit-ready with the click of a button and continuously optimize their license allocations. This capability is more important than ever as organizations are getting squeezed by price increases and licensing changes with the recent change for Oracle Java SE.

Watch these videos to dive deeper into Snow’s Oracle Management capabilities.

Optimized S/4HANA migration, increased privacy, and complete license visibility for Snow Optimizer for SAP^® Software customers

We’ve added a variety of enhancements to Snow Optimizer for SAP^® Software, including:

Migration from ECC to S/4HANA – The new S/4HANA Trusted Authorization Review (STAR) feature integrates the functionality of the authorization object analyzer report into Snow Optimizer for SAP^® Software. You can import and manage authorization object classifications. The reports allow you to run an authorization object classification against users or roles to show the FUE or S/4HANA user requirements or to analyze and optimize the roles. You can save and export the results of the two simulation reports.

Pseudonymization – If your organization has high privacy requirements, only certain users should be able to see sensitive user data. With this new pseudonymization feature, you can specify which users can show usernames in an encrypted format and hide selected user data fields.

License dashboards – The dashboard feature allows you to view all licensing-related information at a glance with two new tiles. The first tile shows the number of connected systems from which no data was loaded for a given number of days. This is an easy way to determine if the data you are working with is up to date. The second tile allows you to switch between different dashboard layouts. You can easily navigate to up to three different dashboard designs without having to close the current dashboard.

To see these new features in action, please view our What’s New in Snow Optimizer for SAP^® Software video. 

For all of the details of this release—including improvements to dashboards, rule sets, and License Intelligence — please refer to the version 3.3 release notes.

Focused views added to Snow SaaS Management

Snow SaaS Management has incorporated AG Grid to provide users new ways to configure how data is presented in tables.

• Resize, auto-size and re-order columns to customize information flow and presentation.
• Filter numeric columns by greater than, less than, equal to or by ascending/descending order.
• Filter text columns depending on the inclusion or exclusion of specific terms.
• Filter columns containing data categories using multi-select.

Customer feature request: New license administration capabilities

We listen to our customers. We track your suggestions and feature requests, and nothing makes us happier than successfully implementing a customer feature request in our products. One such request involves license administration, specifically how purchase dates relate to agreement dates.

The new enhancements to Snow License Manager provide you with benefits, such as: 

• When you want to attach a license to an agreement, you can now register a license purchase date that occurs outside of the agreement period.
• When you add a license with a subscription period, you can now register a license purchase date that occurs before the subscription period begins.
• Since the license purchase date is no longer tied to the agreement period, you can now search for the agreement when you want to attach a license to an agreement.

Centrally monitor inventoried computers

Snow Atlas partners have specific needs and with our new release, they will gain visibility to their entire customer portfolio and can benchmark the status of one customer environment against another. With centralized monitoring capabilities, partners can quickly diagnose issues and offer greater value to their customers for performance areas to improve.

Partners can now easily see the inventory status updates for all their customers.

Partners are now able to quickly zoom into their customer tenants to see inventoried computers and get a view by type and OS over a time period (last 7, 30, 90 days).

Automated lifecycle recognition

A critical part of managing any software application is staying up to date on its lifecycle. Milestones such as end-of-support, end-of-extended-support or end-of-life often dictate when customers should upgrade, move sensitive data, or switch vendors altogether. 

Snow’s Data Intelligence Service now automatically captures and updates lifecycle data on a daily basis for top vendors most requested by our customers – Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, VMWare and Adobe – and we’ll be continuously adding to that list.

What’s next?

We have more product updates and innovations coming. Subscribe to our blog, so you don’t miss a thing.

Not a customer yet? Schedule a demo of Snow to see the power of Technology Intelligence.

The post What’s New at Snow Software: May 2023 appeared first on Snow Software.

Snow Atlas customers can now identify critical software vulnerabilities.

• Identification of critical software vulnerabilities
• Discovery of applications that may expose personal data (PII, GDPR)
• Proactive evaluation of new software for critical risks before deployment

Check out the demo video below to find out more about how you can identify and remediate software vulnerabilities in your IT environment with Snow Risk Monitor.

Beta programs: Cloud cost visibility and containers

Good news for any Snow customers interested in getting a sneak peek of—and value from—our upcoming product features. We currently have two beta programs focused on getting visibility to assets in the cloud.

Current Snow Atlas customers will automatically see these new features. On-premises customers interested in beta testing can fill out this form or reach out to their Snow Account Manager or partner.

Snow Atlas uptime visibility

Providing customers, partners and users with visibility into their IT landscapes is at the heart of Snow’s mission. A new feature in Snow Atlas, Snow’s technology intelligence platform, shines a light on ourselves.

Snow Atlas customers and partners now have access to the status of all major Snow Atlas regions, providing full transparency into Snow Atlas uptime. This new capability will enable greater efficiency and peace of mind.

Expanded control over Snow Atlas access

Snow Atlas customers are gaining more control and visibility to users accessing the platform to improve overall security.

Customer administrators can now set a time limit for how long a partner and Snow Support users have access to the Snow Atlas partner console.

Partners and customers will enjoy increased visibility to all authorized end users and the ability to audit or investigate users provisioned over time, lowering their risk profile.

Friendly Lenovo models out of the box

Years ago, for their machine naming, IBM decided to use both a model number and a more user-friendly model name. Lenovo took over not only that data model but also the pesky habit of storing these pieces of data in different parts of the Windows registry. We are happy to report that Snow now brings together this information and, by default, displays the user-friendly model name instead of the model number. Customers that previously created customizations to display the model name can retire them and get back to an out-of-the box configuration. See a few examples of model name vs. wmic # and get the full release notes.

Recognition of Java applications

We’ve leveled up our inventory scanning capabilities for Java applications distributed as JAR files. Now, our agent for Windows scans the metadata information to populate vendor and version information. This enables a number of benefits including more complete software recognition and helps Snow Risk Monitor to provide more complete reporting regarding software threats from JAR files. Get the full release notes and more details here.

Cloud financial management

To effectively manage cloud costs, Snow Cloud Cost offers full visibility into public cloud consumption, real-time monitoring, accurate forecasting and tailored savings recommendations. Recent improvements enhance business mappings to improve cost allocation and provide a better understanding of cloud consumption.

Users can now easily map multi-cloud and Kubernetes spend. Business mapping allows users to accurately tag multi-cloud and Kubernetes spend data, assign shared costs equitably, and report cloud spend to drive FinOps collaboration. Recent updates have made mappings easier than ever to build and manage.

This includes allowing users to better understand cost allocations prior to viewing within the Cost and Usage Explorer. In addition, detailed rules and operators have been expanded to support values such as purchase option and line type. These updates offer users the ability to create the precise granularity they need.

You can also now gain better understanding of cloud consumption. Snow Cloud Cost’s Cost and Usage Explorer allows stakeholders to generate reports to analyze and manage cloud consumption.

Our latest update provides improved accuracy of amortized costs with AWS savings plans. Also, better usability for troubleshooting, warnings and errors enables stakeholders to make smarter cloud-investment decisions.

Improved user workflow for faster connector setup in Snow SaaS Management

SaaS Management on Snow Atlas users can now enjoy faster time to value with several workflow enhancements around API connector setup, including:

• The available connectors are now separated into two sections to show which connectors have been enabled for quick and easy reference.
• The connector discover page side panel now includes a description of specific data pulled by each connector, so users can quickly understand connector utility.
• The connector table now includes the ability to take actions such as run, test connection, edit, enable, disable and delete connector directly from the table.
• A new help button has been added to the connector discovery page to streamline actions to take in case the desired connector(s) are missing from the available connector list.

What’s next?

We have more product updates and innovations coming. Subscribe to our blog, so you don’t miss a thing.

Not a customer yet? Schedule a demo of Snow to see the power of Technology Intelligence.

The post What’s New at Snow Software: April 2023 appeared first on Snow Software.