Configuring Asset Management › Collect Tasks › Software Usage

Software Usage

The software usage collect task offers the software licensing administration feature which can be used to do the following:

• Monitor which software packages and applications installed in your organization are being used by what assets
• Measure the usage frequency of any application, whether it is executed from a server or local disk
• Police the number of copies of software products that are running on the computers in your enterprise to comply with license agreements and to save upgrades to new software as the users are easily identified
• Detect any application that has been started and stopped on the computer (software audit)
• Prevent the use of unauthorized software, including prohibiting users from installing software on their own and ensuring that a company uses only the admissible number of licenses
• Instead of defining what software cannot be used, a system administrator can define which applications are allowed and no other applications will then be executable on the desktop.

  Important! This configuration must be done very carefully as the user will not be able to run any other application than the specified ones. You must test your configuration in a test environment before applying it on a live environment.

You can select the applications you want to monitor, specify the number of available licenses per application, and indicate the action to be taken if the specified number is exceeded. You can specify the following actions:

• No action (Monitor only)
• Show a warning
• Prevent the application from starting

You can monitor the whole site, a particular group of assets, or a single asset. You can set up the software usage collect task to distinguish between the software packages installed on local drives and on network drives.

Though you can configure software usage collect task both at the computer and user level, configuring it at the computer level lets the software usage agent run as a service using the Local System account. This ensures that the agent is running always, regardless of which user has logged in.

Note: The software usage feature is available for all the software signature definitions defined in the database. However, for virtual applications, software usage and auditing are not supported.