DIciek asked a question.
Are there documented best practices for Client metering in large (12K device count) customer environments?
- What are the “best practices” for metering on client computers? (what do other customers do? How often do they scan? Do they use metering on the clients)?
- What would the impact be? (we currently have around 12k client assets)
- DB wise? (how much additional data)
- Performance wise? (would we “overload” the inventory server if each client sends data every day?)
- What else to be considered?
As long as you follow the requirements for large estates, there would be no issue in including metering.
Users are usually using much less applications than what is actually discovered by the agent.
In our estate, each snowpack would come back with several 1,000s of rows, (most of them being discovered software) and only 10 to 20 lines of metering.
In summary, there is nothing there that would choke the Inventory Server 🙂
But note that the metering is kept for the period of time that is specified in the SLM Console on the server (See the section "Basic Settings" if I remember well). Imagine it is set to keep the data for 90 days, then you would get maybe 90 x 20 = 1800 records max per client. For 12K clients, that represents an top max of ~20M records. On average I would expect much less, a 1/3 of that.
On the SLM side, those records fill up principally 2 tables if I am not completely wrong: tblDataMetering and tblApplicationConcurrency so you can turn the feature on for a specific config file that you push only to a portion of your estate and you can keep an eye on the DB size and more specifically on the size of those 2 tables.
In our 35K-client estate, tblDataMetering for 90 days takes 8.5GB and tblApplicationConcurrency takes 24GB (including indexes)
For your estate (based of the figures in ours), I would assume something like 10-12GB for SLM plus a couple more GBs for Inventory, maybe 15GB.
Hi,
can you also answer this question?
Best regards,
Dan
Not sure what you mean by "best practices" as we've never worked with a customer who has turned off metering in the agent configuration.
The main selling point of SLM is the fact its agent does do metering to give you richer data to work with in say software/license reharvesting processes.
Most customers will also be ok with the default single day scan and really only alter the time if needed.
I agree with Joseph,
The best practice is to turn it on. Then you make sure you exclude any metering on the C:\Windows folder but I think it may be done by default.
Here is an extract of our config for the <Meter> section:
<Meter>
<Exclude>
<Path>%windir%\*</Path>
</Exclude>
<Span>
<StarTime>PT00H00M</StarTime>
<EndTime>PT23H59M</EndTime>
</Span>
<Occurance>
<Weekday>monday</Weekday>
<Weekday>tuesday</Weekday>
<Weekday>wednesday</Weekday>
<Weekday>thursday</Weekday>
<Weekday>friday</Weekday>
<Weekday>saturday</Weekday>
<Weekday>sunday</Weekday>
</Occurance>
</Meter>
We are on 50K devices and also do use softwaremetering within the Agent.
But to be sure if that matches your requirements, you should check Snows documentation on this
Snow-system-requirements
Best Practices for Large environments