Best way: Enable usage metering at installation or later via user interface of the tenant ?

[Frank07]

I know usage metering on the Flexera agent on devices is not switched on at normal installation. It is possible to change it in the setup file.

I also know you can switch it on later via the user interface of the tenant by creating a discovery and inventory rule.

My question is why is it not turned on in the normal installation. There must be a reason for this (performance, more data).  Does anyone know the reason for this?

I could use an advise what is the best way to enable usage metering. Do it at start and enable it via the setup file during the installation or later via user interface by creating a rule ?

[kclausen]

You can implement the Usage Agent either way.  Most customers do not want to install the Usage Agent on their servers, only on their desktops.  Therefore, during agent install you can have 1 bootstrap file configured to install the agent for Desktops and another bootstrap file to NOT install the usage agent for Servers.

Or you can perform the install without the usage agent to begin with, and then create a Discovery Inventory Rule with corresponding Targets to install the Usage Agent on Desktops.

Kirk

[ChrisG · Accepted solution]

Enabling usage tracking using the Allow application usage tracking on these targets option on a Target configured in FlexNet is the normal way to control usage tracking. See the following thread for some further discussion about this: How to enable Software Metering on existing FNMS agent?

On Windows, you can set the USAGEAGENT_DISABLE = TRUE setting in the mgssetup.ini file used as part of the agent installation to enable usage tracking at installation time. However any value configured at installation time could later be overridden by an explicitly set value on a configured Target.

Usage tracking is typically not enabled by default due to privacy concerns about gathering this type of data in some parts of the word - the out-of-the-box default is the more conservative "do not collect".