Metering Application Usage and Creating Custom Reports
Client Management Suite
lets you collect various data from the managed computers, store the data in the Configuration Management Database (CMDB), and then create custom reports that display that data.Below is a sample process for creating a custom report that displays the collected Adobe software inventory and usage data. You can use this report for a software audit or to determine the computers on which the software in not used. You can then use Software Management Solution to uninstall the software from these computers and reclaim licenses.
In the following example, you use Inventory Solution to collect data about installed Adobe software, and then track the software usage with the application metering feature of Inventory Solution.
Application metering is supported for Windows only. The software usage information is limited to Windows XP and above.
Step | Action | Description |
|---|---|---|
Step 1 | Meet the prerequisites. | You must have Symantec Management Agent installed on the client computers. |
Step 2 | Install the Inventory and Application Metering plug-ins. | Note that you use policies to install the plug-ins on the client computers. If you use default settings, it can take up to one hour for Symantec Management Agent to request the configuration update, receive the policy and install the plug-in. You can request configuration manually from the Symantec Management Agent GUI, or by running the Update Client Configuration client task |
Step 3 | Collect full inventory. | The predefined inventory policies are enabled by default and configured to run ASAP on every computer with the Inventory plug-in installed. Then, policies run daily , weekly or monthly to send the updated inventory information to Notification Server. For example, the Collect Full Inventory policy is set by default to run once on every computer ASAP, and then every Monday at 18:00.You can configure the policy schedule according to your needs. |
Step 4 | Create an application metering policy for the software. | The application metering policy records application start and stop events, and sends the application usage data to Notification Server. |
Step 5 | Create a custom audit report and view inventory data. | You create a report that displays data about the number of software components that are installed on the client computers and the number of times the software has been used. You can use the following methods to create a custom report:
Using plain text SQL gives you more flexibility, but if you don't have extensive SQL language knowledge, you can use Query Builder to build a custom report. However, using Query Builder requires the knowledge of the CMDB tables and the data that they contain. |
Step 6 | (Optional) Create a drill-down report. | You can create a drill-down report. For example, you can create reports that show the list of computers on which a particular software product is installed. |
Step 7 | (Optional) Use other methods to view software inventory and application metering data. | Client Management Suite provides reports and dashboards that let you view software inventory, application metering data, and other types of data. |