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With Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) 2.0, Microsoft introduced a new application management utility called Software Metering. This feature enabled the SMS administrator to monitor the use of applications among SMS clients, to track license usage, to place restrictions on running applications based on time or permissions, and to spot unauthorized applications when they were run.
This feature in SMS 2.0 required you to identify a server to act as the software metering server for the site. This site server maintained its own data cache and was the point of data exchange between the clients and the site server database. Unfortunately, software metering was not well integrated into the rest of the product and, as a result, proved to be cumbersome to configure and manage, and in its license tracking mode, it tended to generate a significant amount of network traffic. Consequently, SMS administrators didn't much use this feature-at least not the license-tracking part of it.
In SMS 2003 software metering has been completely reengineered. In this chapter we'll look at how software metering has changed and the components that participate in the software metering process. We'll look at how to configure the software metering client agent and at software metering rules. We'll explore how to view reports based on metered data and identify some maintenance tasks.
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