Perl Success Story: Client-Side Collection and Reporting
by Jiann Wang |

Learning from the Process

All of this information that we collect is of little use if it is not easily accessible for analysis. We also wrote a script to retrieve and format information from the database and present it via the Web. This allowed users and application owners to see the current inventory status of their users, and also help them to determine which users still need to run the client inventory tool to complete their assessment. The script provides summary, detail, and exception views. With reports available through the Web, users can access it from any web browser, regardless of the user's geographic location. This empowers everyone involved to see the results in near real time.

Upon deployment of the tool, we then recorded and summarized user inventory information automatically. Some interesting results came to light. It became apparent that up to $163,000 worth of additional license purchases were unnecessary, as the existing pool of licenses had not been depleted (as we believed earlier), based on the manual inventory results submitted. Also, with the client inventory tool being an internally developed tool, there were no licensing costs for distributing it at various sites.

The client- and server-side components took two weeks to develop. We formed test cases before writing the code in order to minimize functional issues during final testing in the field, as well as to ensure that we did not overlook critical features and integration issues during the development process. Ultimately, as illustrated in Figure 2, the client and the various server components must work together as an integrated system.

Figure 2. The client and server working together

The use of virtual machine software was also instrumental for testing and reduced overall development time. It allowed me to simulate client environments and test client code without having to use a physical machine for each version of the BI application. Using undo disks, I was able to return the VMs to a prior state very quickly without manually uninstalling the various BI tools from the VM. We initially tested the inventory tool in Singapore, Japan, and the U.S., and this testing confirmed that the tool was able to perform well even though users were spread across remote geographic locations.

Although we developed this tool for a one-time inventory of the number of BI clients deployed in the field, it also has a role going forward in helping to maintain an accurate picture of the licenses deployed. Possible enhancements include converting the tool so that we can install it as a service to run without user intervention for periodic updates of client inventory data from identified clients, auto-conversion of licensing from one client class to another, and automatic uninstall of clients, should the user decide that he or she no longer needs it. In staying with the near-zero client management paradigm, we can extend the client to contain auto-update features by checking the local version and verifying it against the latest published version on a central server.

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