Software metering refers to several areas:
*Tracking and maintaining
software license
A software license is a legal instrument (usually by way of contract law, with or without printed material) governing the use or redistribution of software. Under United States copyright law, all software is copyright protected, in both sour ...
s. One needs to make sure that only the allowed number of licenses are in use, and at the same time, that there are enough licenses for everyone using it. This can include monitoring of concurrent usage of software for real-time enforcement of license limits. Such license monitoring usually includes when a license needs to be updated due to version changes or when upgrades or even rebates are possible.
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Real-time
Real-time or real time describes various operations in computing or other processes that must guarantee response times within a specified time (deadline), usually a relatively short time. A real-time process is generally one that happens in defined ...
monitoring of all (or selected) applications running on the computers within the organization in order to detect unregistered or unlicensed software and prevent its execution, or limit its execution to within certain hours. The
systems administrator
A system administrator, or sysadmin, or admin is a person who is responsible for the upkeep, configuration, and reliable operation of computer systems, especially multi-user computers, such as servers. The system administrator seeks to ensu ...
can configure the software metering agent on each computer in the organization, for example, to prohibit the execution of games before 17:00.
* Fixed planning to allocate software usage to computers according to the policies a company specifies and to maintain a record of usage and attempted usage. A company can check out and check in licenses for mobile users, and can also keep a record of all licenses in use. This is often used when limited license counts are available to avoid violating strict license controls.
* A method of software licensing where the licensed software automatically records how many times or for how long one or more functions in the software are used, and the user pays fees based on this actual usage (also known as 'pay-per-use')
Short explanation of active/passive software metering
Active software metering occurs when a user is specifically denied use of a metered application. Passive software metering occurs when application use is simply recorded and no control is asserted over maintaining a maximum concurrent usage level.
References
See also
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License manager
A software license manager is a software management tool used by Independent software vendors or by end-user organizations to control where and how software products are able to run. License managers protect software vendors from losses due to ...
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Product activation
Product activation is a license validation procedure required by some proprietary software programs. Product activation prevents unlimited free use of copied or replicated software. Unactivated software refuses to fully function until it ''determin ...
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Software license
A software license is a legal instrument (usually by way of contract law, with or without printed material) governing the use or redistribution of software. Under United States copyright law, all software is copyright protected, in both sour ...
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Systems management
Systems management refers to enterprise-wide administration of distributed systems including (and commonly in practice) computer systems. Systems management is strongly influenced by network management initiatives in telecommunications. The ...
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System administration
A system administrator, or sysadmin, or admin is a person who is responsible for the upkeep, configuration, and reliable operation of computer systems, especially multi-user computers, such as servers. The system administrator seeks to en ...
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Key server (software licensing)
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License Statistics
System administration
Computer systems
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