Product Discovery
Product Discovery builds a live inventory of the software actually installed across your organization's workstations. The OpenLM Workstation Agent scans each machine and reports what it finds; Product Discovery filters out operating-system noise, normalizes the results, and matches every application against the SAM Catalog. The outcome is a single, deduplicated answer to "what is deployed, where, and for whom" — the installed-software side of your software estate, complementing the entitlement records that Software Asset Management keeps.
Product Discovery does not appear in the app launcher yet. Open it directly at https://<your-cloud-host>/samproductdiscovery/.
Product Discovery is a newer capability in early availability on the OpenLM Cloud Platform. Availability depends on your plan and account activation.
Software Discovery is the AI pipeline that grows the global SAM Catalog by researching software publishers and their products. Product Discovery looks at your own estate: it inventories the software physically installed on your workstations. The two meet in the middle — what Product Discovery finds is matched against what the catalog knows.
Prerequisites
- The OpenLM Workstation Agent is installed on the workstations you want inventoried. Agents scan installed software on their own schedule and report the results automatically — this screen only shows the results.
The screen
Product Discovery is a single screen. Three summary tiles at the top show the running totals, and four tabs below them hold the working views:
The Applications tab, with the three summary tiles above the tab strip.
| Tile | Shows |
|---|---|
| Total Applications | Distinct applications currently installed across all workstations |
| Workstations | Workstations that have reported at least one scan |
| Unmatched Apps | Entries in the unmatched queue. Each entry is a raw name-and-publisher variant recorded since discovery began, so this number can exceed Total Applications |
| Tab | What you do there |
|---|---|
| Applications | Browse the discovered software inventory, drill down to where each application is installed, and weed out noise. |
| Workstations | See every reporting workstation, what is installed on it, and its scan history. |
| Unmatched Applications | Work the queue of applications that have no catalog match yet: match them by hand, mark them as noise, or dismiss them. |
| Exclusion Rules | Review the built-in noise filters and add your own rules for software that should never appear in the inventory. |
How discovery works
- Scan. Each Workstation Agent scans its machine's installed software and reports the results. Scans arrive on the agent's own schedule.
- Filter. Every reported application is checked against the exclusion rules. Operating-system components, drivers, update packages, and known bloatware are dropped before they ever reach the inventory.
- Normalize and match. The surviving applications are cleaned up (names, publishers, versions) and matched against the SAM Catalog. Matching compares product names and publishers, and falls back to the application's process names when the reported name is too far from any catalog name. A local catalog entry wins over a global one when both fit.
- Update the inventory. Each scan is compared with the previous state of that workstation: new installations are added, existing ones are refreshed, and an application missing from three consecutive scans is marked inactive. Applications with no catalog match land in the Unmatched Applications queue.
About unmatched applications
A long unmatched list is the expected starting state, not a problem. The catalog's coverage grows continuously — both through OpenLM's own Software Discovery pipeline and through the unmatched applications that Product Discovery itself reports back for enrichment — so applications matched today were often unmatched last month. Leave entries you don't care about alone, and spend review time only on the software you actually track licenses for. See Unmatched Applications for the ways to resolve an entry.
Related
- SAM Catalog — the catalog that discovered applications are matched against.
- Software Asset Management — sellers, purchases, and entitlement records.
- Workstation Agent — the agent that scans and reports installed software.
- Software Discovery — the AI pipeline that grows the global catalog.