Altiris 8.5 Application Metering/Usage Tracking

[David Warner]

We are trying to monitor usage of the different versions of Adobe Acrobat that we have deployed to user. So we can get a better understanding of how much people are actually using it now that most browser and Microsoft products will convert things to PDF for you. We have all the different versions of Adobe setup as Managed software and we have created 2 usage tracking rules for each managed software resource to monitor Acrobat.exe and Acrodist.exe. It is reporting accurately the inventory totals of who has it installed. And we are getting were getting some usage results but the numbers looked real low to me. So I tried testing the tracking on 3 of my test systems and my daily system by installing Acrobat on them and using them in different ways. 2 of them I was able to get them to finally report usage but only for when I would print to the Adobe PDF printer, which uses Acrodist.exe. But if I just had Acrobat.exe running it would not report that Acrobat had been used. I can't understand why it is reporting on usage for one rule but not the other. 
Also when I created the usage tracking rules, I used the pre-defined rules, so it's not like I typed something wrong. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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David Warner
Desktop Systems Engineer
Sunovion Pharmaceuticals
United States
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[Chris Farrell]

Hi David,

Since you mention rules, I assume you are on 8.5 RU3 or RU4. If so, I would look at your rule and see if the version will catch the exe's in use, such as File Name: acrobate.exe Version: 15.*, and compare it to the file/product version on your test computer. Also verify your test computer has the Software listed on the Inventory tab by looking at the Installed Software report to make sure it matches exactly one of the Software Names listed on the Inventory tab of the product. You can right click the line in the report to view details and verify your test computer is listed:

In these latest versions, data is sent up as the software is used instead of once per day, so its quicker to troubleshoot.
If all looks good, then you might run a ProcMon trace while starting the application(s) to see what processes are initiated and then add those to the rule as needed. 

Also useful is the Underutilized Software report (which also has a drill-down aspect):