Perl Success Story: Client-Side Collection and Reporting
by Jiann WangDecember 01, 2005
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi GST) formed in 2003 as a result of the strategic combination of Hitachi and IBM's storage technology businesses. The company offers customers worldwide a comprehensive range of hard disk drives for desktop computers, high-performance servers, and mobile devices. With offices and manufacturing facilities spanning the globe, deployment of the corporate business intelligence (BI) tool suite is extensive. The company uses BI tools throughout the business, from manufacturing to sales and warranty operations, for analysis of data that reside in operational data stores and data warehouses. With each new manufacturing site comes requests for additional licenses.
A Business Intelligence Problem
To avoid unnecessary spending on licenses, the company needs a detailed assessment of both the number and type of licenses actually deployed at the various sites. We operate in a highly competitive environment in the technology industry and can ill afford to continue purchasing unnecessary licenses. An effort was started to determine how we deploy the current pool of licenses. The initial effort to perform a software inventory for the BI tool involved a manual inventory by each site owner or application owner. As expected, the results returned appear to indicate a significant under-licensing with one of the products from the BI suite. Looking at the raw information sent in by each owner, we had speculated that we double-counted some users and that some users may be misreporting the client that they have installed on their system, thus driving up the license count for the respective product.
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Based on the preliminary analysis of the information collected, it became evident that we needed to deploy a software inventory tool to assess each workstation and determine what users have actually installed on their machines. The corporate software asset management tool was not a viable option, because it had limited deployment, with some organizations maintaining software inventory using manual methods. The licensing issues of deploying a commercial tool, along with the customizations needed in order to accurately capture the different types of licenses, would be prohibitive from both a time and cost perspective.
In order to generate an accurate license count, the software inventory tool must be able to detect the different types of BI clients that may be installed on a given PC. The release information of each version is also important. We can use this information to determine which users need upgrades to the latest supported release. Our license entitlement limits the number of each type of client from the BI suite that we can deploy across the enterprise. To further complicate matters, there are two different types of client-server tools that use the same binary, with no easy way to distinguish between them by looking at the installed applications listing in Windows. The difference in cost between these two tools is approximately $3,400 per license, so it is imperative that the inventory count is correct for each specific type of client. In addition, a web-based version of the BI tool is available as a plugin. However, the plugin version information is inaccurate in the binary file and the client-server tool version is incomplete in the registry. In preliminary tests of a commercial tool, it was unable to distinguish between the two types of clients and missed the web plugin altogether.
The Design of a Solution
Given this challenge, we had to develop a custom solution to address the problem. I had previously used Perl to develop an automated software delivery and installation solution on the Windows platform, and some of what I had already developed was very similar to what we needed. Leveraging this prior experience reduced the amount of time and effort needed for development of the software inventory solution to address our immediate needs.
The solution criteria that we set forth required that the client inventory tool must be relatively compact and not require any installation. The tool also must be a self-contained executable that a user can download and run on their client. If a tool is difficult to use or install, this severely curtails its adoption and use. The user population is spread across multiple locales, including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, so the tool must be simple to understand and must avoid complex procedures.
Each user also needs to authenticate against the corporate LDAP directory to ensure that their results are accurately recorded and ensure the authenticity of the result. In addition, the inventory results must be collected and stored on a central server to ease management of the inventory process. The results must also be readily accessible to all users and owners so they can see where they stand in comparison to what they had originally reported.
The solution involves a client tool and a server-side application. The combination of the two must authenticate the user against the corporate enterprise directory, inventory the client system, log the results, and record the results in a DB2 back-end database. The data stored in the DB2 back-end database is useful for generating both summary and detail reports via the Web. The specific modules used in the development of the solution included Win32::OLE, Win32::GUI, Win32::File::VersionInfo, Win32::TieRegistry, IO::Socket, CGI, DBI, DBD::DB2, and Net::LDAP.
