WHITE PAPER

MONITORING HARDWARE UTILIZATION

WITH NIGHTWATCHMAN

THE PC
ESTATE PROFILER

HARDW
UTILIZA
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THE PC ESTATE PROFILER

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The PC Estate Profiler

Why might this be useful?

How it works

How PC usage data is collected

The yearly and weekly reports

The daily report

Abstract
This paper looks at how NightWatchman
enables the enterprise to retire unused
PCs and deskspace, which can save
organizations over $8,000 per desk on
average through its accurate visibility
into usage,

THE PC ESTATE PROFILER

The PC Estate Profiler

The PC Estate Profiler is a strategic
decision making tool for organizations.
It monitors and reports hardware
utilization of all PCs across an estate
enabling key stakeholders to make
intelligent and informed business
decisions. It further reduces the energy
footprint and administrative overhead
by:

The PC Estate Profiler automatically

tracks how usage varies with, for
example, the adoption of flexible working
practices. Enterprises can set policies
based on the latest information, helping
to maximize their energy cost savings.

Highlighting periods of inactivity across

an PC estate enabling administrators to
apply more granular power policies
and schemes for these periods
Identifying unused PCs based on user
activity, administrators can safely
remove unused hardware, thus
reducing the administrative overhead
and maintenance costs.

the network, further eliminating the

management overhead of maintaining
these machines.

Why might this be useful?

PC Estate Profiler determines when users
are actually using their PCs by monitoring
key strokes and mouse movements. This
information can be used to set power
management policies, for example, by
matching the power state of each subset
of PCs, by location, with the activity level
of employees.
The extra visibility provided by the PC
Estate Profiler provides a more dynamic
alternative to taking baselines.
Undertaken when power management is
first deployed, a baseline provides a
highly accurate snapshot of PC usage at
that moment in time, but unless the
process is repeated on a regular basis,
this information over time becomes
outdated.

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The PC Estate Profiler, through

aggregating PC usage over time, can also
identify unused or underutilised PCs on

How it works
Hardware utilization monitoring is
enabled through the power policy or for
non-policy-based deployments, the
administrator can push out a commandline and/ or registry change to the 1E
Agent.
Once enabled, PC usage information is
collected and aggregated for fixedlength periods, for example, by hour. The
data is sent to the WebService as a batch
process once per day and is aggregated
to report tables.
Reports are generated which provide a
break-down of this data in a similar way
to the existing NightWatchman reports
- daily/ weekly/ monthly reports, queried
by date range/ location with a drill-down
to sub-locations.

THE PC ESTATE PROFILER

How PC Usage Data is Collected

Hardware utilization monitoring has two
settings the aggregation interval and
the sample interval, for this example we
will use an aggregation interval of 60
minutes and a sample interval of 10
minutes. The lower the interval the more
granular the results. The following is a
breakdown of how it works:
1. PC usage is logged per day, starting at
midnight and ending at midnight
2. In this example (see Figure 1 below) we
have 24 aggregation intervals set to 60
minutes
3. For each 60 minute aggregation
interval we have six sample intervals of
10 minutes (6x10min=60min)
4. Every 10 minutes the state of the PC is
recorded (see tables in figure 1)
5. The predominant state for the
aggregation interval is reported up
In Figure 1 we can see that between 4am
and 5am the PCs predominant state was

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logged as low power state (state box 1),

this is before a user has started work for
the day.
Between 12 noon and 1pm the
predominant state was locked (state box
2), the user could be on lunch, and in the
afternoon between 3pm and 4pm the
predominant state was logged on with
user activity (state box 3). This indicates
the PC is in use.
Other states when the PC is not in use are
locked and logged on with no user
activity. If the PCs has spent a significant
period of time in either of these states
this indicates that the device could be
more aggressively power managed.
If the PC is logged off, locked or in a low
power state all of the time this indicates
that the device could be
decommissioned.

THE PC ESTATE PROFILER

The PC Estate Profiler Reports

There is currently three reports out-thebox a yearly, weekly and daily report.
Reporting on hardware utilization will be
extended in future releases. If additional
information is required before the next
release custom reports can be put
together with the help of 1E Professional
Services.
The yearly and weekly reports
These reports can be used to identify
unused hardware in your estate. The
reports display hardware utilization

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broken down by month/ day, based on a

selected location and calendar year/
week.
Data is broken down by desktop/ laptop
split, and shows, per month, a
breakdown of the percentage of used
and unused PCs, the number of used
desktops and laptops, and the total
number of PCs which have reported
hardware utilization for that period.

THE PC ESTATE PROFILER

The yearly and weekly report also include a break-down by sub-location showing the
average percentage of used/ unused PCs during the year/ week, the number of used
desktops and laptops and the high-water mark. The high-water mark is the highest
value seen (for used/ unused PCs) in that sub-location for any particular month/ day.

The weekly report offers a drill-down by day.

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THE PC ESTATE PROFILER

The Daily Report

This report should be used to set power
policies by locations. For example, by
filtering the report by department you
could see for example, sales and
marketing generally work 9am to 7pm
but engineering works 10am to 8pm.
Power policies can be set accordingly.
The daily report displays, for a selected
location and day, the number of used
desktops, used laptops and unused PCs,

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broken down by hour of the day. The hour

of the day is based on the local time of
each PC, not UTC time. It also displays a
before noon and after noon summary,
showing the number of used desktops,
used laptops and unused PCs for each
half of the day.

THE PC ESTATE PROFILER

Whilst undertaking research for this

feature, it was clear that many
organizations today do not know how
many PCs they have deployed and if they
are being used. Having the ability to
monitoring hardware utilization within
you organizations is a powerful tool
which can realize many benefits.
Highlighting periods of inactivity across
your PC estate allows you to apply more

safely remove unused hardware, thus

reducing your administrative overhead
and maintenance costs.
If you would like to discuss this feature in
more detail please get in touch with a 1E
ActiveEfficiency expert today.

granular power policies and schemes for

these periods. Identifying unused PCs
based on user activity means you can

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About 1E
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management tools save billions, solve
problems and simplify the management
of large, complex IT environments in
record time. Designed with a singular
focus to help drive down costs, 1Es
solutions include tools for IT asset
management, Windows systems
management and BYOPC.

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1E shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein.