BACKGROUND

1. Technical Field

Present invention embodiments relate to software discovery, and more specifically, to controlling the scanning of shared resources by devices for the purpose of software discovery.

2. Discussion of the Related Art

Software discovery refers to the detection of software that is installed on a computing system. Software discovery may be performed for a variety of purposes, including the tracking and management of software licenses. When performing software discovery, it may be necessary to detect not only the software that is installed on a local computing system, but also any software that is installed on a remote resource that is shared with the system. For example, if a device has both local storage and a mounted network resource, then software discovery may be performed on both the local storage and the network resource. One difficult aspect of performing software discovery on shared network resources is that multiple devices may simultaneously perform scans on the same shared resource, thereby negatively impacting the resource's performance.

SUMMARY

According to one embodiment of the present invention, a computer system performs software discovery on a shared resource in a network. A logical group is generated for the shared resource, wherein the logical group includes a plurality of devices accessing the shared resource. A designated device is selected from the plurality of devices for performing a software discovery operation on the shared resource, wherein the selection is based on one or more performance factors. Results of the software discovery operation on the shared resource are received from the designated device. The results of the software discovery operation are distributed by the designated device to the plurality of devices. Embodiments of the present invention further include a method and program product for performing software discovery on a shared resource in a network in substantially the same manner described above.

