As explained in License Compliance Components, the number of installations of a product is one of the three primary pieces of information that is required to determine the product’s license compliance. Your installation data can come from two different sources:
Inventory Data: Asset Inventory scans the devices in your ZENworks Management Zone and saves the installed software product information to the ZENworks database. Asset Management maps the installation information to discovered products. When a discovered product is associated with an entitlement, the discovered product’s installations are eligible to consume one of the entitlement’s licenses.
Using Inventory to provide the installation data is the recommended approach because it is the most automated. If a product is installed or uninstalled on a device, the change is automatically reflected in the data (and the corresponding discovered product) after the next Inventory scan. In addition, using Inventory data provides the ability to use both device-based and user-based license models (see License Models for Inventory Entitlements).
Manual Data: You manually edit an entitlement (in ZENworks Control Center) to provide the number of product installations. This requires you to know how many devices have the product installed, and to change the number whenever installations are added or removed. In addition, you are limited to using only installation-based license models; device-based and user-based license models are not available (see License Models for Manual Entitlements).
An entitlement can use only one source for its installation data. However, a licensed product can include multiple entitlements, with some entitlements drawing installation data from Inventory data and other entitlements using manual data.