Summary

The application usage component in the FlexNet inventory agent does not reliably generate and upload files containing usage metering data unless the computer is turned on (and the agent runs for) longer than the agent’s UploadPeriod preference setting value. The default value for this preference is 24 hours.

Usage data will rarely (or never) be saved and uploaded from computers which are rarely (or never) turned on for longer than this period.

Symptoms

The primary symptom of this issue that may be observed is that expected usage data does not appear from computers, especially when viewing raw data on the Raw Software Usage web UI page.

Information about when (if) usage data files are generated on a computer can be found by inspecting the usageagent.log file. Logging similar to the following is output whenever a usage file is generated:

[11/20/2021 5:46:27 PM (G, 0)] {2772} Finished reading the session cache, sessions summarized to file C:\ProgramData\ManageSoft Corp\ManageSoft\Usage Agent\UsageData\computername at 20211120T174627.mmi

If a usage data file is not generated at any point over the course of a week, that data may be discarded and not included in any usage data file that is subsequently generated.

Mitigation

This issue can be avoided by upgrading to an agent version containing a fix. See the ”Fix status” section below for versions that this issue was first fixed in.

The impact of this issue can be minimized without upgrading the agent by reducing the value of the UploadPeriod agent preference to a value that is less than the typical duration for which computers are turned on. For example, setting UploadPeriod to “21600” (seconds, in other words, 6 hours) will ensure usage data is generated and uploaded from computers as long as they are turned on for at least 6 hours.

IMPORTANT: Decreasing the UploadPeriod preference can result in a larger number of usage data files being generated and uploaded than would otherwise be the case. This may place additional load on beacons, inventory and database servers as they process this data.

A typical rule of thumb applied when planning how many beacons to deploy is to allow for 10,000 computers per top level beacon in the beacon hierarchy. However if the UploadPeriod preference is configured so that computers will to generate more than one usage data file per day, the number of beacons may need to be increased accordingly. For example: if computers generate an average of 2 usage files per day, a top level beacon may only be able to upload files from 5,000 computers in a day.

Additional information

The UploadPeriod agent preference is configured in the following entry under HKLM\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\ManageSoft Corp in the Windows registry, or the agent’s config.ini file on Unix-like operating systems: ManageSoft\Usage Agent\CurrentVersion\UploadPeriod

See documentation for the UploadPeriod agent preference: Gathering FlexNet Inventory > The FlexNet Inventory Agent > UploadPeriod