As most of our customers know, software usage analysis is a critical component of effective IT asset management, offering a means to analyze whether software investments are being fully utilized, ensure concurrently-licensed apps are being used within proper usage limits, and evaluate usage patterns of unauthorized applications within your environment.  This month, we’ll take a look at the “Software Usage Statistics” report, one of Express Software Manager’s most widely used reports, which provides valuable insight into application usage patterns within your organization. 

The Software Usage Statistics report, when filtered by license unit, helps you determine the percentage of any given application launched within a specifed time frame, as well as more granular details such as average amount of time used (or unused) per day.  These statistics provide clues as to which applications may be underutilized and represent opportunities for re-harvesting and/or renegotiating license agreements to better reflect actul usage.   In other situations, the report can be used to examine the prevalence of unauthorized, harmful, or “nuisance” applications within your organization.  To investigate further, you can click on any of the displayed license units to see usage patterns for each application on individual machines, and even sort that data based on usage to see which machines show the highest and/or lowest amount of activity.   

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If you need to review detailed network inventory information across your organization, the Custom Hardware Inventory report is the place to find it. 

Prior to running the Custom Hardware Inventory report, you’ll be asked to select the attributes you wish to report on (Screenshot 1).  The Fixed Attributes column to the left shows the default hardware attributes Express Software Manager collects.  The Custom Attributes column shows additional hardware or software values that can be selected by the administrator to include within the report.  These items are collected by a variety of methods including WMI, the registry, imported list, or manual entry of data. 

When you think about reporting found within Express Software Manager, you probably think of IT asset inventory reports relating to hardware and software installations, application usage, and purchasing information. Did you know the Express Reports Console also contains reports that shows important administrative details about the machines you’re managing using Express Software Manager? For example:

• Which machines are using an Express Client license?
• Which machines don’t have the Express Client installed?
• Which machines are connected via terminal server?
• Which machines haven’t been inventoried recently?
• Which machines haven’t checked in recently?
• Which Express Clients haven’t been upgraded to the current version?

All these questions, and many more, can be answered using the “Express Client Status” report, found within “Administrative Tools” section of the reporting console.

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