johnnynguyen asked a question.
We are required to monitor Think-Cell usage in the business and need to remove licences from users who are no longer using it. I had generated an "Applications per user" report to show last used usage information for the think-cell application.
Snow Atlas has detected some of our users as to have last used Think-Cell months ago, however we have received direct feedback that they have actually used it daily or in the previous week.
As Think-Cell is a plugin used by Powerpoint, I can understand its a bit complicated for the metering to be accurate.
I have also found some old community posts with this same/similar question:
- Does anyone have experience with metering Think-Cell?
- Does anyone have experience metering or managing think-cell licenses? This is a PowerPoint add-in, so the "last used" date shows the last time they opened PowerPoint, not necessarily using the add-in.
- Hi all, anybody have new information if the usage of think-cell apps can be metered by Snow. When I run the usage report, the information bring only no more than 3% of the total users...
Hoping to see if there is any further development into the metering of Think-Cell. Also, keen to see if anyone else has found any workaround to monitor Think-Cell usage.
The detection for Think-Cell is based on many rules.
You would need to check in the rules definitions which are the files that get detected on your devices and determine if they are all consistently based on EXE files or any file that can actually be executed as a process and then be metered by the agent.
Note that the agent queries the list of active processes every 15 seconds (or maybe every 5 seconds if you are using a config file that still has the old value that used to be recommended before). I am not very familiar with this plugin but it could be that the execution is very short and happens between 2 queries of your process list. Or it could be that the use of the plugin does not always require running the EXE file.
Some investigation would be needed on your part to determine exactly how the metering gets detected. Poking at the content of the snowpacks where the metering gets detected will also help, you will be able to see what was actually recorded.
Hi Samuel, appreciate your detailed response. I am still relatively new to the world of Snow, are you able to point me towards any documentation that will help me look into this? I've had a look at Snow Docs and couldn't find any information in the Snow Atlas section. Thanks
Hi @Johnny Nguyen​
Good day!
As far as I remember, there were no changes on how software metering works. Snow Agent capture using the running process. The application generates a process and Snow Agent monitors this process start run and when the process terminates.
I did some digging, and I can see similar was asked before Feed Detail (snowsoftware.com)
Echoing the same answer.
Hope this helps.
Hi @Johnny Nguyen​
Along with the above answer, it is indirectly mentioned in the KB article