Remote Usage for Streamed Commercial Applications Report

IT Asset Management 2024 R1.4 (Cloud)

The Remote Usage for Streamed Commercial Applications report helps to size the risk on remote usage of per-device streamed applications. This report contains the following information:

• The streamed commercial applications locally installed, used by end users on Windows Server streaming servers in the last 90 days.
• The remote client usage in the last 90 days.
• A worst case on used applications and accessing computers.

When an application used through streaming (for example, Citrix or Microsoft RDS) is licensed by device (for example, Office Professional Plus), each device used to perform the remote access needs to be licensed. Having the precise data throughout a long period of time is not possible. The only way to size the risk and license the streamed applications using the "worst case" is to correlate, user by user, the usage on streaming servers (based on file usage) and the usage in the same period of Remote Access Applications, such as the Citrix Workspace client or the Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection client (mstsc.exe).

The Remote Usage for Streamed Commercial Applications report makes this correlation over a 90-day period.

Example use case

John uses Office 2016 Professional Plus on three streaming servers deployed with Windows Server in the last 90 days. Two servers are Citrix servers (CTX01 and CTX02), and one is a Microsoft RDS server (RDS01).

To access the servers, he uses mstsc.exe from Laptop1 and CitrixReceiver.exe from Laptop1 and Laptop2 in the last 90 days.

The Remote Usage For Streamed Applications report shows John the usage for each server and each executable file. More importantly, the report shows that the "worst case" usage is that Laptop1 and Laptop2 need to be licensed for Office Professional Plus, which requires per-device licensing. Furthermore, the report also shows whether Laptop1 and Laptop2 are already consuming a license, and which license if any, for the Office Professional Plus product.

Generating the report

1. Go to the Saved Reports page (Reporting > Saved Reports & Views > Saved Reports). Navigate to the "Discovery and Inventory / Inventory" folder.
2. Use the following filters to reduce the amount of the returned data. When no filter is used, there could be over one million records returned.
   • Products: You can select one or multiple streamed products that you want to find the application usage for on Windows Sever in the last 90 days. If no product is selected in this filter, all products will be returned.
   • Applications Covered by Device License: If this filter is selected, only the usage for applications that are linked to an active device license with the "device" license type will be returned.
   • Remote Access Applications: You can select one or multiple remote access applications. Each selected application can be an existing commercial application (for example, Citrix Workspace) or a user-created local application that links to the files you want to track usage for. To create such a local application, follow the instructions in Adding an Application and specify the following properties as required:
     • General / Name": Must be to set to "User Defined Remote Client".
       Note: By default, the report will look for a "User Defined Remote Client" application. Therefore, this fabricated application is useful if you query the report with the SOAP API which will use the default remote access application.
     • General / Publisher: Must be set to "Custom".
     • Evidence / File / Name: For example, "mstsc.exe".
     • Evidence / File / Recognition rule: Must be set to "Not for recognition".
3. Click Run report.

Reading the report

Columns in the report are grouped under the following headers that identify their underlying database objects:

• Application
• Remote device
• Streaming server
• User

The following table lists all the columns that are available in the report. Some of these columns, as indicated as "optional" in the table, are not displayed by default; however, you can make them visible by moving them out of the column chooser.

Column name	Description
Application properties
Flexera ID	A generated code that uniquely identifies all application records, and can be used for integration between products from Flexera.
Licensed	The commercial application used on the streaming server is monitored by a license. This row has licensing interest.
Licensed by device license	The application used on the streaming servers is covered by a license of "device" license type. This row represents a special risk for device license consumption and must be carefully considered.
Name	Name of the application locally installed that has usage in the last 90 days on the streaming server.
Product	The basic name of the application, excluding the publisher and references to versions or editions.
Publisher	The name of the publisher of this software, responsible for its development and distribution.
Remote device properties
Already Consumes a license for product	The remote device already consumes a device license for the product of the application used on the streaming server. This means this remote usage does not trigger any additional need for a device license.
Device name	The remote device that has usage for the user in the last 90 days for a file covered by the Remote Access Application.
Domain name	The name of the domain to which the computing device belongs. Tip: Records fabricated for special purposes display special values: A dummy device record created for imports through your connector to Flexera One SaaS Management displays flexera.com A record representing an Oracle Database running in Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) shows the full DNS alias (excluding the actual machine name), such as clv8xj7busyg.eu-west-1.rds.amazonaws.com
Remote Client Executable	The executable file related to the Remote Access Application that has usage in the last 90 days for the remote user. It may be helpful to relate the streaming server role (for example, RDS Server or Citrix server) with the remote client executable file (for example, mstsc.exe or Receiver.exe) to decrease false positives.
Serial number	The serial number of the device, attempting to uniquely identify either the hardware (for a stand-alone device) or the virtualization container (for a virtual machine), as reported in inventory. Tip: This displays Flexera SaaS Manager with a numerical suffix in the special case where the inventory device is a dummy record created for linking with imports through your Flexera One SaaS Management connector.
Substitution device	If there is no device with usage in the last 90 days for the user for any of the files covered by the Remote Access Application, the report will either show an existing computer on which the user is the primary user or fabricate a "User Account Name (Remote- to create)" computer name.
Streaming server properties
Device name	The server where the commercial application file usage has been reported for the user. The streaming servers are Windows Server devices with usage for a commercial application in the last 90 days.
Domain	The name of the domain to which the computing device belongs. Tip: Records fabricated for special purposes display special values: A dummy device record created for imports through your connector to Flexera One SaaS Management displays flexera.com A record representing an Oracle Database running in Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) shows the full DNS alias (excluding the actual machine name), such as clv8xj7busyg.eu-west-1.rds.amazonaws.com
Operating system	The operating system running on this device. Tip: This value may be blank because: The device is recently discovered – the operating system can only occasionally be populated during first discovery, and is often backfilled once inventory is returned for this device. The device is a VM host that is a hardware frame that may not be running its own operating system. In this case, the computer Name field is set to a serial number associated with the hardware (because, without an operating system, there is no host name). In fact, no inventory of any kind is possible without an operating system, so IT Asset Management synthesizes the VM host record from common data reported by its guest VMs. The virtual machines in these cases may typically be partitions like: LPARs running on IBM PowerPC servers Solaris zones on either x86 or SPARC architectures nPar or vPar partitions running on HP Integrity servers.
Users with 90 day usage	Number of distinct users that have commercial application usage in the last 90 days on the streaming server in this row. A high number is an indicator that the server is a Citrix or RDS streaming server.
Users with 90 day usage for application	Number of distinct users that have usage in the last 90 days for the application on the streaming server in this row. A high number is an indicator that the server is a Citrix or RDS streaming server.
User properties
Account name	The user's login name.
Domain name	The domain registering the account name of the user of the installation or allocation.
Full name	The first, middle, and last names of a user. Note that you can modify the user's full name, for example, to exclude a middle name or patronymic. Remember: If a user record was added manually, it contains the user's first and last names, plus the middle name if any. If imported from another system through a business adapter, then the value displayed in the Full name field would depend on the data source and structure of the adapter.