Application Metering Solution

You keep up with all of your Microsoft patches right? You go through the usual Black Tuesday dance of testing and deploying your patches like any good System Admin would. What about your non-Microsoft applications? Are you keeping those up to date? They can be just as critical as your Microsoft patches.

I recently had someone ask the following:

I watched your video regarding application metering, I can make everything work besides the reports. The application metering agent doesn't seem to report anything back to ns server. I tried some different settings but I cannot get it to work, do you have any experience about this?

Right after I got Application Metering up and running I started to check what programs were being run on the computers that I manage. I noticed a few that looked a little fishy. I decided to block them, just to see what would happen. I noticed that every couple of days someone would install the software and try to run it over and over. This week I decided to take a closer look.

Recently I have been flooded with frustrated calls from my users. They are all complaining that their computers are running really slow. Before I checked their computers I developed a plan. I decided to remove the "extra" software that seems to creep on to their computers, run a virus scan, and defrag the hard drive. I noticed that on many computers that "extra" software seemed to creep its way in. This software caused the computer to slow down, caused annoying popups, and were security problems. I also found that some people had software that I was unaware of. I decided that I need to have a little better feel of what was going on in my environment. Application Metering has helped me keep better tabs on the computers I manage. In this article I will talk about the benefits of Application Metering and how to configure this great solution.