Snow Inventory Agent - Metering mechanism

Viktors asked a question.

December 29, 2017 at 8:00 AM

Hi! I have a question regarding agent metering process. Is there extension's list, which is supported by Inventory Agent? For example, there are extensions, which are included in predefined agent configuration: <IncludeCriteria> <FileType>exe</FileType> <FileType>wfd</FileType> <FileType>wfi</FileType> <FileType>wtd</FileType> <FileType>wti</FileType> <FileType>sys2</FileType> <FileType>lnk</FileType> </IncludeCriteria>‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍ ‍ ‍ ‍ ‍ ‍ ‍ ‍ ‍ From the agent's instruction I have got this information: The primary focus of metering is desktop applications. Metering of usage is performed whenever a Windows process is running. Processes are measured whether the application is open on the desktop or running in the background. And from "All Snow Inventory Agent 5 Settings with Detailed Explanations" this: FileType Optional element. May be specified multiple times. If software is to be included it must match one of the file types specified. Uses wildcard matching. Example for Linux, OSX & Unix systems: ELF*executable* Example for Windows systems: sys2 Does it mean, that I can provide (theoretically) <FileType>*</FileType> to meter all file extensions? (eg. vbs, jobs, etc.) I am asking for this information to compare Snow metering option with SCCM (which provides metering information only for .exe extensions). Best regards, Viktors

Landon Owens (Flexera Software)
8 years ago
Hello Viktors , Metering does not look at file extensions. That is only significant to the daily inventory of the system, not the monitoring for metering data. That information is gathered by the service through a polling period of the processor threads. To better illustrate what is being captured open your task manager, and click on the Details tab, like this: Anything with a PID (Process ID number) will get captured and logged. Just to fill in the rest of the process. What is collected is data like this one from Notepad++ App Path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++\notepad++.exe Local: 1 File Version: 6.8.0.8 Product Version: 6.8.0.8 Metadata Comments: Company Name: Don HO don.h@free.fr File Description: Notepad++ : a free (GNU) source code editor File Version: 6.88 Internal Name: npp.exe Legal Copyright: Copyleft 1998-2015 by Don HO Original FileName: Notepad++.exe Product Name: Notepad++ Product Version: 6.88 User Company_Server\Snow Remote Desktop usage Client Name: Company_Computer 1 run(s) at 2016-09-09T08:24:15 Active between 2018-01-04T08:24:15 and 2018-01-01T08:25:15 This is all collected from the metadata on the PID, so even if the file is not located in a directory we inventory, we will find it when launched. Additionally, and you can see at the bottom of the example were we also captured who launched it, and in this case it was a remote launch, so we captured the client system's name as well, Plus, we recorded the amount of time the PID to be active. NOTE: this data is stored on the local system in an encrypted file. Hope this helps If you have any additional questions, I will be monitoring this thread, Landon.Ownens Snow Support Manager – North America
Expand Post
- Viktors
  8 years ago
  Hi , Thank you very much for provided information and describing agent's metering process from technical side! Best regards, Viktors
  Expand Post