Software Metering

Endpoint Admin offers an additional software metering solution that integrates into the main Endpoint Admin solution. 

Software metering enables administrators to set up rules for the automatic revocation of licenses or uninstallation of software on metered devices, which allows administrators to reclaim licenses that are not being used in the organization, potentially reducing costs for licenses significantly. 

License revocation can simultaneously work on a user-license level, where the solution automatically removes a user from a configured Entra ID group (the license group), and on the device-level, where the solution simply uninstalls the metered software from the machine. The solution can be configured to only work on either user-licenses or devices, or both at the same time. 

Software Usage/Utilization Statistics Data Collection 

The software metering offered by Endpoint Admin is supported by a software agent running on each metered machine as a service, which periodically reports application usage statistics to the Endpoint Admin metering backend. 

The software running on each client is tracked using file definitions set by the application owner in Endpoint Admin. In practice, this means that the file definitions for public applications can only be configured by Super Admin users (System Owners), while the definitions for private applications can be configured by any authorized user in the subscription that owns the application, and for MSP applications, users authorized in the MSP subscription can set the definitions of their MSP applications. 

Attribution 

The service can accurately attribute software usage statistics to the currently signed-in user in scenarios where there is only a single interactive user logged into the device, and when the usage data is stored in the database of the backend, the data is attributed both to the signed-in user and the device. 

The metering agent tracks which file definition was used to detect the software on the device, and this is stored in the backend when the usage data is submitted. 

Metering Rules 

Every day, a background job triggers the evaluation of the Metering Rules, which are rules configured by administrators to determine when a device or user should have the enforcement action triggered on them, such as uninstalling the metered software, revoking the license for the metered software, or both. 

Metering Rules have two options for selecting which devices or users should have the associated corrective action of the Metering Rule enforced upon them; 

• Days of collection before enforcement 
  How long the metering system should collect data from a device or user before considering an enforcement action on the device or user. 

• Minimum Time Used 
  Determines the minimum amount of time the device or user needs to have had the software running for, to not have the enforcement action triggered on them. 

Metering Rules can be applied to one or more applications in the public, private, and MSP software repository. Every application can only have one Metering Rule set.

Rule Enforcement Logging 

When a metering rule is enforced on one or more devices or users, it is logged both in the main Audit Log of Endpoint Admin, and in a specialized log for Metering Rule Violations, which are viewable in the “Violation Events” page in the Metering section. 

Enforcement Action Behaviors

The data collected from metered devices is used differently depending on which enforcement action is configured on the metering specification of the application.

Uninstall

This action uninstalls the metered software from the metered device when the minimum usage time has not been met during the course of the days of collection before enforcement. For this reason, all data attributed to the device regardless of which user submitted it, is considered.

This means that only the usage data for the device itself is considered. Usage data for other devices of users that have submitted data for this device is not considered.

Revoke License

This action revokes the license of the user of the metered software by removing them from the license group configured for the software in Endpoint Admin. The usage data of the user across all devices they have submitted data from for the metered software is considered when evaluating whether the action should be enforced or not.

Revoke License & Uninstall

This action revokes the license of the user and uninstalls the software from all the devices where the user is a primary user, using the same data as the “Revoke License”-action does.

Details on “Days of collection before enforcement”

The days of collection before enforcement are counted based on the first piece of unarchived data submitted by a user or a device depending on the enforcement action selected.

This means that the days of data collection starts at the first point at which the metering system has received data from a device. For example, if the first data arrives at midnight at the 1st in the month and the “Days of collection before enforcement” is set to 20 days, then the device has a window of the 1st in the month until the end of the 21st day in the month. And from then on, the usage data is considered as a sliding window always going 20 days back in time.

Configuring Metering on an Application 

To configure metering for an application, navigate to the application in the repository where the app resides, and open the application sidebar by clicking on the application row, and then open the Metering-tab. In here you can see the Metering Specification of the application.

In here you must configure the following: 

1. Who/what should be metered:
   1. Everyone 
   2. Devices / Users in the selected groups 
2. Choose an existing Metering Rule, or create a new one
3. If the Metering Rule is configured for License Revocation, then configure the license group to remove any users in violation of the minimum usage requirement from:
   1. Select the option to use the license group of the shop (requires that the app is configured for shopping and has a license group setup in the shop configuration) 
   2. Select an existing Entra ID group 
   3. Create a new Entra ID group
4. If you are the application owner or a Super Admin, you can setup the file definitions to identify the application on the metered devices by clicking the “View definition” button which brings up the list of file definitions wherein you can add new definitions or remove existing definitions. 
   1. If you are not authorized to add file definitions, and there are no definitions in the list, or the appropriate definition is missing, you must contact the owner of the app/repository and ask them to add the missing definitions. 

Monitoring of Metering Data

At this time a dashboard for metering data provides an overview and access to key points of collected data, herein:

• How many devices that are currently configured for data collection
• How many devices that have checked-in to the metering backend in the past day, week, or 30 days
  • Clicking on the pie chart displays which devices fall into the checked-in or not checked-in category.
• How many apps are metered and not metered
• How many apps are detected as unused, used for under an hour (total sum), or used for more than an hour (total sum)
• How many users and devices have violated the metering rule by not meeting the minimum usage time during the course of the days of data collection.
• Average usage time per. device and per. user for each metered application, and the total number of devices and users that have submitted data for the application
  • Clicking on the “view details” button allows the user to see the usage time for each device and user combination.

Start using Software Metering

Contact Sales

To get started using Software Metering in your subscription(s) contact Endpoint Admin sales.

Grant Consent to the Endpoint Admin Agent Application

After Software Metering has been enabled on your subscription, you will be able to grant admin consent for the Endpoint Admin Metering Agent application in Azure, doing so is required to allow silent SSO authentication from the client.

If you do not grant consent, the metering agent on each metered device will not be able to authenticate with the metering backend, and no data will be collected.

Deploy the Metering Agent

The Metering Agent can be deployed via the public repository in Endpoint Admin, alternatively you can download the package from the public repository and distribute it to your target machines yourself.

The Endpoint Admin agent is currently only available for Windows 7+ devices, and automatically installs all required dependencies.