Client Management Suite

We are running Altiris 7.1.  We have an application that is installed on most of our corporate computers, but a lot of people do not need it and do not use it.  We are trying to gather a list of computers, where users actually have ran the software.   I thought those metrics might be available in the IT Analytics - Installed Software Cube, but is not working.  Can anyone point me to a process/method where I can obtain that kind of information in Altiris?  Also, this application is cutom built VB6 stuff and takes a 3 pages of directions to install it, so it is not packaged in the Altiris software library.  Hoping we could possibly query it by filename, like C:\ProgramFiles\Custom\CustomApp.exe or something like that.  Even the name of a table that might contain some of that info would be helpful.

Thanks,

Dan

You need to enable Application Metering for that application and that requires it to be defined in the Software Catalog.

Plain old .exe files are inventoried by default software inventory rules so at least you have data on where that app resides.  You can create a Software Catalog for just the .exe and then enable metering.

However, the big gotcha is that you only get usage data from the point in time that you enable the metering policy. 

Also, you'll have to understand for yourself what you mean by "not used".  Do you mean 30 days?  90 days?

Finally, a difficult to install piece of software is a great candidate for Software Virtualization.  You realize that with CMS you own the necessary license to use that, right?

Yes, HighTower is correct, you need to enable Application Metering. Currently, we use a wildcard and meter all applications so that we absolutley have the data because like HighTower said you can only pull data once you start metering it. Once you enable it, you can use this SQL querey I wrote to pull the data. Just replace "Photoshop" with the name of the exe you are looking to discover...

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If there is anything else you'd like added to that report let me know, happy to help. 

Can you describe if you've had a notable impact on DB size running Metering against everything?  I'd consider that but not if my DB doubles in size :)

I am interested too... We thought about that, but we are going to reach over 30K workstations and a big amount of servers too, so metering everything may need a database such big as 10 football stadiums....

For metering with the wildcard on EXE? Yeah the tables are pretty substantial, however, we only have about 3000 endpoints so the database is still pretty manageable in size (100gb or so) 

Ouch, I'm managing 7200 endpoints with a 56gb database.  I could envision this swelling to 120gb or more.
 

Thanks, it's definitely something to keep in mind.