# Getting Started

The Open iT® Suite of IT asset management tools is designed to meter and report on application, server, storage, database, and service usage across an entire organization, from a total enterprise view down to each individual user.

With Open iT, the user can:

• Get a centralized overview of all the distributed resources in the network
• Observe trends and initiate action to meet upcoming needs
• Obtain high-quality service levels
• Reduce costs
• Plan investments proactively, and
• Discover undesirable usage patterns in the organization's IT infrastructure

Open iT solutions can help improve service levels while reducing costs, eliminating the need to increase investments and manpower to achieve better service. Our solutions also help predict future resource requirements and obtain high-quality service levels by revealing current trends in resource usage along with unexpected problems that drive costs up and service levels down.

The Open iT software and strategic consulting enables customers to gain control over their IT resource use, cut costs and waste, and improve the reliability and performance of their IT assets.

Client-Server Model

Open iT is a software that collects data from multiple sources and stores it in a central location using a client-server model. Clients installed on machines gather raw data and send it to a designated server for processing.

The raw data goes through various data filters in the Core Server, and the filtered data is stored in an Open iT internal data warehouse. This data will be available in the Reporting Server and Analysis Server.

Data Flow

The client converts the raw data collected from the original license manager data source to a format that is readable by Open iT. The client periodically sends the converted data to the server, where it is stored in its incoming directory. The server then processes this data into a reportable format at predefined intervals and finally stores it in its database.

Once the process is completed, the data is ready for report generation. The report generation sequence interacts with the server to retrieve the data needed to generate reports. At this stage, based on the type of report selected from the user interface, report generation programs are run, and the output is written to the specified directories. These reports can then be viewed using a standard web browser.

Quality of Open iT Sampled Data

Open iT data sampling will always give good overall numbers when you have high usage counts. However, as soon as a significant number of checkouts last for a shorter time than our sampling interval, we lose some of the short-term fuzz on the usage curves. We need more samples to catch all of them at the individual user level.

The sampled result will often give good numbers for overall use since usage patterns are not random. Though some local max/min values will happen more randomly, usage will almost always follow fixed trends. For example, users come in the morning; usage rises and peaks in the afternoon, with a dip around lunch and a fall off in the afternoon. Even combining input from multiple time zones/regions does not remove the usage pattern.

We will not see what happens between each sample point for sampling, so Open iT will miss some maximum and minimum values. However, the overall trend will be seen even with low-frequency sampling.  An example may illustrate this better. Below is a chart of values representing the actual usage of a license, where licenses can change at every step.

If we collected samples every 5th of these steps (e.g., 1, 6, 11, etc.), we would see the following usage pattern:

Though the minor variations are missing, we still have a good overview of the general usage pattern.

When we collect usage data, we let each user last as long as the sampling interval and summarize this. Though these numbers are only partially accurate per sample, they will give satisfactory results over time if the missed max/min variation is reasonably random. We will report approximately as much over and underuse as possible, averaging over time.

In the previous example, we would use:

The longer the reporting period covers such data, the more accurate it will be. For example, though a 5-minute value may be measurably wrong, a day report will be pretty good, and a month report will be very close to actual values.

We need to be more careful when reporting data for specific users since we will only see each user occasionally if checkout time is short.

In the first estimate, when the checkout time is 1/N of the polling period, we need, on average, N samples to catch each user. In an extreme case where a particular function is only checked out for a single second every 5 minutes to perform some calculation, our default 5-minute sampling (300 seconds) will need 300 such samples on average to catch the user. Since there are just under 100 sampling periods in an 8-hour working day, we would get a sample of each user one or two times/week. If the function is used less (i.e., just a few times a day instead of every 5 minutes), then most individual users will never be sampled in an average week or month, and the per-user values (max and elapsed time) will be wrong.

On the other hand, if the usage ever reaches the license maximum, all the following samples are likely to show this value or one close to it, so the customer will see the effect of denials.

The Open iT® Suite offers various options for IT asset management and optimization. These options include the Base Professional platform with the Open iT Core Reporter and the Base Enterprise platform, containing both the Open iT Core Reporter and the Analysis Server.

The Open iT clients are set up with module-specific configurations. These configurations include the three levels of the LicenseAnalyzer™ designed for specific usage monitoring of licensed applications and various plugins for added functionalities.

Open iT caters to your specific needs with a variety of Point Solutions for monitoring and management of licensed applications.

The Open iT Suite offers two technology platforms:

• Core Services
• Core Server Web Interface
• Analysis Server

• Core Services
• Core Server Web Interface

The following unmodified tools are included in the Open iT software product or used by the Open iT software:

• Apache HTTP server
• Software under the GNU General Public License
• A standard Perl interpreter
• PHP
• Java
• The Zlib data compression library
• The FOX Toolkit
• TinyXML
• Lua
• Python
• cURL
• NSSM
• Caddy
• SQLite
• AutoHotKey
• Amazon Web Services (AWS) Command Line Interface Tool