RMS200593: How to Implement the Application Usage Agent of the Standalone Agent – Raynet Support Panel

Installation

By default, the application usage agent is disabled in the standalone agent. To enable it during installation:

Locate the [Usage Agent] section with the mgssetup.ini file.
Remove the semi-colon (;) from the front of the following line:

;USAGEAGENT_DISABLE = False

Agent Configuration

The following table lists the managed device preferences that determine which types of applications are included in application usage metering:

Type of application	Preference	Default
Add/Remove Program entries	UseAddRemove	False (not included)
Manually mapped applications (see Specifying the list of applications to meter for further details)	UseManualMapper	False (not included)
Applications run by a logged-in user	UserProcessesOnly	True (only applications executed by a logged-in user are included)
Applications packed in the native package format (Windows Installer, RPM, or PKG)	UseMSI	False (not included)

To see all configurations that can be made in terms of usage agent, refer to Chapter 9 of the “RayManagesoft Deployment Manager Discovery Guide.pdf”

Below is a watered down version of what needs to be done to get the Application Usage Agent working in an environment.

Note 1: If you find during testing that the amount of uploads has dramatically increased, then you can either increase the value for the Upload period in seconds option or set the Enable upload within usage agent option to false for production.

Note 2: If you find that any of the other options that have values in seconds to be too aggressive during testing, then make sure to change their values for production.

Manual Mappings

A manual mapping allows you to target applications that are either excluded by an agent option or if you do not wish the agent to target all applications, by creating registry entries under the following key:

This is an example of how Microsoft Visio usage can be tracked. It is recommended to use regular expressions for the ExecutionPath, as you do not have to provide a full path that might differ between product versions.

Full details can be found in the aforementioned chapter in the Discovery Guide.

Note: If new mappings are added to the registry, then the 'Security Manager Service' service will need to be restarted as part of that action in order for the usage agent to include them in its process monitoring.

Application Usage by Application Report

Usage data is displayed for each application on a weekly basis:

Drilling down displays the list of devices that the tracked application has been used on:

Drilling down further allows you to see the actual usage time on a specific device:

Application Usage by Computer report

This report displays a list of devices that have usage data associated with them:

Drilling down lists all applications pertaining to that particular usage session: