DIciek asked a question.
Can (or should) the value in SMACC Basic Settings for “METERING_HISTORY_MONTHS be set to 0?
Can (or should) the value in SMACC Basic Settings for “METERING_HISTORY_MONTHS be set to 0? What, if any, implications could this cause?
Best regards,
Dan
Hi Dan,
The minimum allowed value is 1.
Application metering is showing who used an application, on what computer, and for how long the application was used. This data is vital to understand to what degree software is used, and for user-based license compliance calculations. Using the METERING_HISTORY_MONTHS setting you specify the date range to use in views, reports, and compliance calculations. The default setting will include the data from the past three months.
As metering data is aggregated it will impact your database growth and Data Update Job execution time negatively, this is a linear growth directly connected to the number of computers inventoried. The more computers, the faster your metering tables will grow.
There is a balance between keeping enough data to cover your reporting and licensing needs and discarding as much as possible to keep your Snow system slim and responsive. This must be configured to your organization’s needs. Involve your SAM stakeholders before adjusting this.
Please be aware that to remove metering data outside of your METERING_HISTORY_MONTHS setting, you also need to ensure that the METERING_HISTORY_CLEANUP setting is enabled.
Tom
It's also worth noting that [most] Microsoft Licensing has a reset period of 90 days before licenses can be transferred to other users, so it should never be set below 3 to be honest.
Hi,
my question would also be: "why would you want to do that?"
Switch metering off in the agent config, if you don't want to use it 😊
Hi,
use case: I do not want to see an application residing on a computer anymore (the "UI" remark in applications view) but I still have metering data. The application will be shown in SLM until the period configured in METERING_HISTORY_MONTHS is over. If I want to get rid of the display, there is no possibility today but removing some data directly in the database. See also here: Snow Ask-Me-Anything: Pay Only for Licenses You Need with SLM (4th May 2022) (snowsoftware.com)
It would be truly beneficial if Snow would switch that from a global setting to a setting configurable per vendor, application family AND application perhaps even edition or version with this hierarchy: version wins over Edition wins over application wins over application family which wins over vendor. This would allow to make default settings on vendor level and change it down the level needed.
BR Michael
Hi,
If you have the option to customize your report and retrieve them from DB then apply "IsInstalled=1" condition in the SQL query after joining the required tables. You'll only get the metering data only for the installed applications from your computers/devices by doing so.