While planning for the deployment of FlexNet inventory agents, questions are often raised about the amount of network traffic that is generated between computers running the agent and beacons that the agent communicates with.
The short but perhaps trite answer is that the generated network traffic is almost always negligible and irrelevant compared to the bandwidth available on modern networks. Most agents will generate no more than some hundreds of KB of network traffic each day.
I recently analyzed some real world data to help put further shape around this. In particular, I gathered statistics about the sizes of a set of key data files that the agent uploads to beacons:
- Inventory (*.ndi.gz) files containing hardware and software inventory.
- Usage (*.mmi.gz) files containing application usage metering data.
Each agent typically generates one of each of these files each day.
Here are the results:
| Measure |
Inventory (*.ndi.gz) files |
Usage (*.mmi.gz) files |
| Expected total file size for 1,000 computers (*) |
99 MB |
1 MB |
| Minimum size |
22 kB |
1 kB |
| Median size |
83 kB |
1 kB |
| Average size |
99 kB |
1 kB |
| Maximum size |
509 kB |
4 kB |
| Number of files in analyzed sample |
419 |
1345 |
(*) The expected total file size for 1,000 computers shown here is a simple extrapolation from the average file size.
This analysis doesn't cover all the data that flows across the network between agents and beacons, but inventory and usage data accounts for the majority of the network traffic that is generated on a daily basis.
For further information about network traffic and other resource requirements for the agent, take a look under the "System load benchmarks" heading on various pages in the Gathering FlexNet Inventory Guide, such as Adopted: System Requirements.
