SOFTWARE METERING - Doesnt work well at all - Please please HELP!!!

[simonwhitelock]

I am running SMS 2.0 with SP3. I have configured software metering as neccessary and have the client installed on all machines on the LAN. I have also configured the data summarisation with an age of 1 week with a granularity of 1 hour. I have entered details for about 10 different licenced software packages. I am using software metering in PASSIVE mode for monitoring only. I was hoping to use this product to conduct a software audit!

All my componenets are running correctly apart from the odd warning from the SMS_COLLECTION_EVALUATOR but I think this is due to a conflict when I back up the database...

Its just I cant get any usefull data out of it!

When I select various reports\views under the summary->licenced software tab it tells me what licences I have registered and quantity, BUT DOESNT display what licences are in use (it displays 0 licences in use). Why is this !??
I just cant figure out why this is happening.

Also, when I exclude an application from the unlicenced list it doesnt dissapear from the list (ie: if I exclude cmd.exe etc..). I have waited weeks for the product to disspear, but it still appears.

I am slowely becoming very disillusioned about this SMS product and have so far found the Microsoft Software Inventory tool (free tool available from Microsoft found under the piracy section of the website) far more usefull and reliable.

If anyone has had some experience with Software Metering and found it worked well in there commercial environment I would be most interested in hearing your story.

 

[snyderj]

From what I hear (and experienced), SMS 2 software metering is inferior and problematic, and there are only a handful of people successfully using this feature. You may not get much (if any) response to your request for help.

 

[Beerice]

I am using the SMS Software Metering component. I have somewhat good results with it.

To answer some of your questions:

1. Reporting is somewhat horrible. You will need to do your data summarizations and build your reports then. You will never really see a "LIVE" usage as your data is only as current as you have it uploading the results to your Site Server.

2. Things will not disappear from the unlicensed section, even after excluding or registering them. What you need to do is to manually remove them from the NONLIC table in your SQL Database. I have done this and all is fine. I have notcied after doing this I do need to reboot both the site server and Software metering server. I assume since I have to do this it is not a solution Microsoft would endorse.

The product could use some tuning on it and it would be an excellent package, but it seems like MS just didn't fluff it out as much as they should have...

Bryce