Abstract: A solution is proposed for monitoring usage of bundles in the OSGi environment. For this purpose, an event notification interface of the OSGi environment is exploited. Particularly, each event relating to a change of state of a bundle (such as its addition, removal, starting and stopping) is detected by an auxiliary bundle—which previously subscribed to the event notification interface. The auxiliary bundle can then forward the detected events to a licensing agent, which identifies the bundle by means of a software catalogue. In this way, the desired result is achieved without requiring any instrumentation of the bundles to be monitored.

Abstract: A solution is proposed for monitoring usage of bundles in the OSGi environment. For this purpose, an event notification interface of the OSGi environment is exploited. Particularly, each event relating to a change of state of a bundle (such as its addition, removal, starting and stopping) is detected by an auxiliary bundle—which previously subscribed to the event notification interface. The auxiliary bundle can then forward the detected events to a licensing agent, which identifies the bundle by means of a software catalogue. In this way, the desired result is achieved without requiring any instrumentation of the bundles to be monitored.

Abstract: A solution is proposed for monitoring usage of bundles in the OSGi environment. For this purpose, an event notification interface of the OSGi environment is exploited. Particularly, each event relating to a change of state of a bundle (such as its addition, removal, starting and stopping) is detected by an auxiliary bundle—which previously subscribed to the event notification interface. The auxiliary bundle can then forward the detected events to a licensing agent, which identifies the bundle by means of a software catalog. In this way, the desired result is achieved without requiring any instrumentation of the bundles to be monitored.

Abstract: The invention proposes a solution for controlling logical guest machines, such as virtual machines or logical partitions, in a system management application (and especially in a licensing application). There is provided an enabler running in a physical host machine implementing the guest machines or in a corresponding console; this enabler gathers information relating to the hardware configuration of the host machine (which information is not available inside the guest machine). The hardware configuration information is then passed to a licensing agent of the guest machine; for example, the desired result may be achieved by means of dedicated variables or registry keys that are accessible without providing any user credentials. The licensing agent directly gathers other information, for example, indicating the software products that are used by the guest machine. The available information is then transmitted by the licensing agent to a runtime server for the correct management of the guest machine.

Abstract: Metering execution of interpreted programs on a data processing system is accomplished. An interpreted program requests a service to an interpreter running the interpreted program. The interpreter invokes a native external function for implementing the service. The invocation of the external function is intercepted. The interpreted program identified according to the external function by accessing a catalogue which associates native functions with interpreted programs. A license management operation is performed according to the identified interpreted program.

Abstract: A solution is proposed for monitoring usage of bundles in the OSGi environment. For this purpose, an event notification interface of the OSGi environment is exploited. Particularly, each event relating to a change of state of a bundle (such as its addition, removal, starting and stopping) is detected by an auxiliary bundle—which previously subscribed to the event notification interface. The auxiliary bundle can then forward the detected events to a licensing agent, which identifies the bundle by means of a software catalogue. In this way, the desired result is achieved without requiring any instrumentation of the bundles to be monitored.

Abstract: A solution for collecting information from multiple clients on a central server is proposed. Particularly, each client records the start and the stop of any software product, and then uploads the recorded information to the server periodically. For this purpose, the client retrieves the current value Ts(a) of the internal time of the server Ts at its startup; this value Ts(a) is stored onto the client as a time base TB. A monotonic counter is then used to measure a time offset Oc relative to the time base TB. Whenever a record R(i) indicative of the usage of a software product is recorded on the client, it is time-stamped with the time base TB plus the current value of the time offset Oc(i). In this way, the time stamp TR(i) of every usage record R(i) is always synchronized with the internal time of the server Ts (independently of the internal time of the client Tc).

Abstract: A solution (500) for metering the usage of software products is proposed. For this purpose, a software catalogue (520c) is used to associate each software product to be metered with an installation signature and a usage signature. In the proposed solution, a scope (A2-A5) is determined for each installation item and usage item (available in the system), which match an installation signature and a usage signature, respectively; the scope represents a property specific of the context of an instance of the corresponding software product. The scope of each usage item (such as a path for an executable module) is then best matched (A6-A7) with one of the scopes of the installation items of the corresponding software product (another path for a different file); for example, this process is based on the number of common levels between the two paths.

Abstract: The invention proposes a solution (200) for controlling logical guest machines (110), such as virtual machines or logical partitions, in a system management application (and especially in a licensing application). For this purpose, there is provided an enabler (220;270) running in a physical host machine (115) implementing the guest machines or in a corresponding console (125); this enabler gathers information relating to the hardware configuration of the host machine (which information is not available inside the guest machine). The hardware configuration information is then passed to a licensing agent (235) of the guest machine; for example, the desired result may be achieved by means of dedicated variables or registry keys (260) that are accessible without providing any user credentials. The licensing agent directly gathers other information, for example, indicating the software products (230) that are used by the guest machine.

Abstract: A method (300) for metering usage of software products in a data processing system is proposed. The products to be metered are identified in a global catalogue (325) by means of multiple attributes of a corresponding executable module (340); the verification of these attributes requires accessing the module through its path, which is not available at run-time (being the module directly identified by a corresponding location for performance reasons) . The solution is based on the idea of creating a local catalogue (350) that associates the path of each module installed on the system (that is included in the global catalogue) with its location. The locations of the running modules are detected (365) periodically from a list of processes in execution on the system. In this way, it is possible to obtain (355) the path corresponding to the location of each running module in a very fast way trough the local catalogue (without any scanning of the system).

Abstract: A method and a corresponding system (200) for metering execution of interpreted programs (220) are proposed. Typically, an interpreter, such as the Java Virtual Machine (215), lacks built-in capabilities for communicating with the hardware and software platform of the computer directly; for this purpose, the virtual machine invokes external native functions through the Java Native Interface (225). The solution of the invention is based on the idea of stubbing the dynamic libraries (235) that implement those native functions. Therefore, when the virtual machine needs a native function (for example, to load a new class), a stub library (250) is loaded in place of the required dynamic library. As soon as the virtual machine calls the desired command, the stub library takes control and identifies the interpreted program that is run by the virtual machine; preferably, this operation is performed by querying a catalogue that associates the new class with the corresponding interpreted program.