Getting started with Software Metering

Track access and usage of desktop and web applications across your organization and gain insights into your license optimization process. You can achieve this for an individual application or at a software suite level.

Selecting the right software

Your Nexthink representative can help identify which software applications are good candidates for software metering. If there is a Software Asset Management (SAM) team in your organization, they should also be involved to maximize the value delivered by this module.

Decide which software to configure first, by identifying the following:

Software with nearly no licenses available in your organization.
Software with a significant associated license cost.
Software with an upcoming contract renewal date.

Accessing the Software Metering module

Select Software Metering from the main menu. From the navigation panel:

Click the Manage software metering to add, edit, and delete software meters. Refer to the Managing Software Metering documentation for more information.
Click the New button at the top of the navigation panel to create a new software meter.
Select an existing software meter from the list to view detailed information about the software usage.

Software metering detail page

On the software metering detail page:

The gauge chart shows the number of users or devices, depending on the type of the software meter, and it is organized by: Using, Underusing, or Installed but not using the software.
The sliding panel in the Software Metering dashboard consolidates all pertinent information regarding the configuration of the software meter. It includes details such as the amount of available data in the system, the monitored application type, the license type, the configured thresholds, and the list of configured applications.

Installed but not using is only available if the software license model is device-based and at least one package is associated with it.

Depending on the configuration of this dashboard, the system uses the following metrics to collect usage:

Desktop application: Focus time metric or Execution duration.
Web application: Web usage time.

Usage breakdown

Entity or Department

View and filter data by:

User-based: department
Device-based: entity

Application

This tab is only available if you add several applications to the software metering configuration.

The table shows:

Using application: The number of users or devices with application usage that exceeds the configured threshold.
Underusing application: The number of users or devices with application usage that is below the configured threshold.
Installed but not using application: The number of users or devices that did not use the specific application but may have used other parts of the suite, or have at least one configured package installed (for device-based configuration only).

Desktop vs. web

This tab is only available if the software metering configuration contains, at a minimum, one web application and one desktop application, or at least one hybrid application.

For some software licenses, such as Microsoft 365, identifying users of web applications who don’t use the desktop equivalent is a valuable insight, as you can optimize the license by changing its type.

This table shows the number of users for:

Using desktop only: Users with desktop usage time, but without any web usage time.
Using web only: Users with web usage time, but without any desktop usage time.
Using desktop: Users with desktop usage time above the configured threshold.
Using web: Users with web usage time above the configured threshold.
Underusing desktop: Users with desktop usage time below the configured threshold.
Underusing web: Users with web usage time below the configured threshold.

List of users or devices

View a list of users or devices for the software meter.

Click on the action menu on the right side of the table and select:
- Export list to download the list of users or devices in a CSV document.
- Drill down to devices or Drill down to users, depending on the context. This action takes you to the Investigations page.
Once on the Investigation page, you can view the list of devices or users and drill down for more information about the usage of the device.
You can also send a campaign to selected employees asking them, for example, if the license can be reclaimed because they are not using the software.

Filtering

Click on the elements of the gauge charts, bar charts or tables to apply filters to the page.
Remove filters from the filtering bar at the top of the page individually or all at once.

Timeframe picker

The time granularity of software metering data corresponds to the timeframe you have chosen. Click on the timeframe picker in the top-right corner of the page to select a new timeframe. You can retrieve data up to the Past 90 days.

Permissions

To enable proper permissions for Software metering:

Select Administration from the main menu.
Click on Profile from the navigation panel.
Click on the New Profile button to create a new profile or edit an existing one by hovering over it and clicking on the edit icon to change the profile configuration.
In the Permissions section, scroll down to the Software metering section to enable appropriate permissions for the profile.

Refer to the Profiles documentation for a detailed description of the permission options.