Software Utilization

Universal Discovery can collect information about the software that is used on discovery nodes. The information that is collected can be used to optimize software license costs, for example, by eliminating unused or under-utilized software installations.

Software Utilization data shows the number of days that an application was used (as a percentage) over a period of time.

Search for	Example	Results
A single word	`cat`	Topics that contain the word "cat". You will also find its grammatical variations, such as "cats".
A phrase. You can specify that the search results contain a specific phrase.	`"cat food"` (quotation marks)	Topics that contain the literal phrase "cat food" and all its grammatical variations. Without the quotation marks, the query is equivalent to specifying an OR operator, which finds topics with one of the individual words instead of the phrase.

Search for	Operator	Example
Two or more words in the same topic	`AND` `and` `+` (plus symbol) `&` (ampersand)	`cat AND dog` `"cat food"+milk` `"cat food"&"dog food"`
Either word in a topic	`OR` `or` `\|` (pipe)	`cat OR dog` `cat \| dog`
Topics that do not contain a specific word or phrase	`NOT` `not` `!` (exclamation point)	`NOT cat` `! dog`
Topics that contain one string and do not contain another	`^` (caret)	`cat ^ mouse`
A combination of search types	`( )` parentheses	`cat + (dog \| mouse)` `cat \| dog + (! mouse)`

Universal Discovery includes a plug-in that collects software utilization data by monitoring the processes that are running on the discovery node. There is a separate file for each day, and there is also a file that contains aggregated utilization information for a utilization period. This summary file is an XML file called discusg.cxu. It is encoded using UTF-8 and then compressed using the gzip file format. When a discovery node is scanned, the Scanner collects a copy of the discusg.cxu file and stores its content in the scan file in a folder called Software Utilization Data. Then, the XML Enricher extracts and processes the software utilization data. The XML Enricher does the following during its processing:

Extracts and parses the XML data out of the stored file.

Calculates the software utilization for each recognized application and adds this information to the enriched scan file.

Adds a Utilized flag to the file attributes.

Tip From a software recognition perspective, any files that appear in the scan file that are unknown and have a high software utilization rate should be marked for teaching. For more information about Application Teaching, see Application Teaching.

To see platform-specific file location information for software utilization data files, see Universal Discovery Agent File Locations.

For details on how to view software utilization data by using Inventory Tools, see Inventory Tools.

For more information on how software utilization data is reported, see Reports.