The Software class data reported by SysInfo™ is derived primarily from the native Operating System's software registry. On Linux, RPM is used, on Solaris the pkg database is used, and so on. Unfortunately when some software products are installed, they do not register with the OS software registry and thus are not normally reported by SysInfo™.

To address this, SysInfo™ contains rules to discover and report on specific, major software products. The list of these specific products is located in the next section.

SysInfo™ uses two internal interfaces to discovery software. The first interface is the Software Product Specific (SPS) interface. SPS is an internal C API used within different sections of SysInfo™'s internals to discovery software. The second interface is the Software Discovery Language (SDL) which provides a scripting language which is interpreted at runtime. The primary difference between these interfaces is that customers can add their own SDL scripts to discover software while the SPS interface is not accessable to customers. See the SysInfo™ User Guide for more information on SDL.