Software metering refers to several areas:

• Tracking and maintaining software licenses. 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.

• Real-time
  Real-time operating system
  A real-time operating system is an operating system intended to serve real-time application requests.A key characteristic of a RTOS is the level of its consistency concerning the amount of time it takes to accept and complete an application's task; the variability is jitter...
  
   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 can configure the software metering agent on each computer in the organization, for example, to prohibit the execution of games before 5 p.m.

• 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')

Software metering provides another benefit to companies by enabling them to set and maintain a consistent set of standards across all levels of a company.

One of the main functions of most software metering programs is to keep track of the software usage statistics in an organization. This assists the IT departments in keeping track of licensed software, which is often from multiple software vendors. Desktop or Network based software metering packages can provide a "inventory" of software, give details of all the software installed in the network with the total number of copies with the usage details of each software, and even track metrics of software use such as how often it's used by a particular department, the peak times it's being utilized, and what add-on

Add-on

Add-on might mean:* Plug-in , a piece of software which enhances another software application and usually cannot be run independently** Browser extension, which modifies the interface and/or behavior of web browsers...

s are being utilized with it. The possible savings on the cost of renewing the licenses of rarely used programs can be well worth the cost of the software.

See also

• License manager
  License manager
  A license manager is a software management tool used by 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 software piracy and enable end-user organizations to enforce compliance with...
  
  
• Product activation
  Product activation
  Product activation is a license validation procedure required by some proprietary computer software programs. In one form, product activation refers to a method invented by Ric Richardson and patented by Uniloc where a software application hashes hardware serial numbers and an ID number specific...
  
  
• Software license
• Systems management
  Systems management
  Systems management refers to enterprise-wide administration of distributed systems including computer systems. Systems management is strongly influenced by network management initiatives in telecommunications....
  
  
• System administration
• Key server (software licensing)
  Key server (software licensing)
  Key server for software licensing is a colloquial or generic description that refers to a centralized computer software system which provides tokens, or keys, to client computers in order to enable licensed software to run on them....
  
  
• License Statistics