Uninstall Evidence

[jiwaniec]

At the risk of asking a dumb question.....would there be a significant risk to consumption calculations if we were to ignore uninstall evidence? We are running into many situations where we know the application have been removed but Flex is still detecting the install and the only evidence showing up is the Uninstall evidence. Also this evidence is only seen when looking at it from a device perspective. When looking at the application level evidence it does not show up. We have ignored a few of these and it has corrected the issue but I am reluctant to do it on a larger scale without understanding the ramifications.

TIA!

[SNeddermeyer · Accepted solution]

From my point of view, it is always recommended to check the detected evidence and the resulting consumption and, if necessary, to initiate measures that lead to a valid license balance.
If the detected evidence only shows "application residues" and is demonstrably irrelevant in terms of licensing terms, measures can be taken that you have already explained here.
Whether this has to be done on a larger scale depends on the evaluation of the evidence. However, you can and must decide this for yourself on the basis of the data. I recommend here to let this flow in the context of the examination for not recognized evidences, in order to improve the recognition and calculation.

Regards, Steve

[ChrisG]

Much (even most) application recognition does depend on installer evidence, so it would likely be problematic if you tried to stop the use of *all* installer evidence for recognition. (And I can't think of a viable way to do that anyway.)

However when you are configuring local recognition rules, a key consideration is working out the most appropriate evidence to use. There is not necessarily one "right" answer - the choice can involve some balancing of different considerations. Despite installer evidence being the most common type of evidence used for recognition, there are certainly some applications where doing recognition based on file evidence will be most appropriate. As an example, the recognition of many Java-related applications in the ARL was recently updated to use file evidence rather than installer evidence.

[JJacildo]

Hello @jiwaniec  , to provide some context in regards to Uninstall evidence types for Installer Evidence, this is the registry key path where the Agent checks:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall

and

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\WOW6432NodeMicrosoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall

Cleaning up the appropriate entry from here should help resolve the issues with the false-recognition of Applications.

I hope that helps.