The vulnerabilities of the Apache Log4j logging package—and the attacks they’ve drawn—have made one thing very clear: If you haven’t yet implemented a software inventory across your enterprise, now is the time to start evaluating and implementing such tools. These aren’t new —  I recall testing one of the earlier products, Landesk, which is now a part of Ivanti, back in the early 1990s. In this post for Infoworld, I go into detail about how you can evaluate Ivanti and four of other leading tools from Atlassian, ServiceNow (shown above), ManageEngine and Spiceworks, why these tools are needed in modern software development organizations, how you should go about evaluating them, what their notable features are, and what these tools will cost.