App licenses and subscriptions can represent a significant proportion of your IT budget. Trelica can help you to reduce unnecessary license costs by identifying opportunities to recover or downgrade app users' licenses based on their usage.
Using the data provided by app integrations and the Browser Extension, you can use Trelica to:
- Assess how frequently users access relevant apps.
- Determine whether existing license allocations are justified and identify any under-used or unused licenses.
- Automate the process of downgrading or recovering app licenses that are not in use.
Assess app user engagement
Trelica collates login data from integrations and the Browser Extension, associates it with the employees and contractors listed in your People directory, and then adds it to your App inventory.
When sufficient app user data is available, you can view the proportion of users that are actively using each app from the App inventory. This can help you identify apps with large numbers of unused user accounts and for which you may want to optimize license allocations.
By default, users are considered "engaged" if they have logged in to the app in the last 90 days. You can change this default threshold for all apps from Settings > Applications > Unused account period.
When assessing app user engagement, keep in mind that the count of total users includes any users on a free tier. Furthermore, if app user data is sourced from your IdP (such as Okta or Microsoft Entra ID), the user count may include users that have been granted access via the IdP but that have never logged in to the app.
User engagement breakdown
Open the app profile to view a breakdown of user engagement based on how frequently each app user has logged in. Alternatively, to compare user engagement breakdowns for multiple apps, open the Reports list and select the User engagement report.
Users that have not logged in to the app within the threshold period are listed as "unused". For users that have logged in to the app within the selected period, their login data is used to calculate their engagement level.
Initially, user engagement is calculated based on the recency of each user's last login, with what constitutes high, medium or low engagement varying according to the unused account threshold selected.
For example, if the threshold for unused accounts is set to 30 days, a user whose last login was over 15 days ago (but within the last 30) will be categorized as low. By contrast, if the threshold is set to 90 days, a user is only categorized as low if they last logged in between 45 and 90 days ago.
As Trelica collects more login data for each app over time, we use this information to provide a more accurate assessment of user engagement. Once the login data covers the selected threshold period, the categorization changes to be based on the number of daily logins each user has made within that period. The lower the threshold, the more frequently a user needs to have logged in to be categorized as high.
The method that is used depends on the amount of data available. For example, if Trelica has login data for an app covering the last 45 days, setting the unused account threshold to 30 days will calculate user engagement based on the number of daily logins in the last 30 days. However, setting the threshold to 60 days will calculate user engagement based on recency of the last login only.
App user details
Open the Users tab to view the last login date for each app user. Depending on the app integration and the features you have enabled, other details - such as license type - may also be displayed. You can use this information to identify app users that may no longer need a paid license.
Sources of app user login data
When using Trelica to optimize app license allocations, it's important to understand the quality of the data available. You can view the source of the login data from the "Users" tab for each app.
The most accurate sources of login data for apps are:
- Direct app integrations that provide login data and for which the session duration is 24 hours or less.
- Your Identity Provider (such as Google Workspace or Okta) if you have enabled "Big Bang" SAML2 SSO for access to other apps. This means that users can only log in to another app (such as Zoom or Slack) via your IdP.
- The Trelica Browser Extension.
If an integration indicates that users have logged in to an app via OpenID Connect (OIDC), this information is recorded and displayed in Trelica as the user's "Last authenticated" date rather than the "Last login" date. This is because the access token granted by OIDC can be valid for several months, during which the user may access the app multiple times or not at all. OIDC authentication data is not used to calculate user engagement levels unless that data is supplemented by data from the Browser Extension.
For more information about the factors that affect the quality and consistency of login data, see App user login and engagement data.
Manage app users' licenses with Trelica
We recommend focussing your optimization efforts on apps that you actively manage with high levels of spending and/or high levels of unused licenses. The Spend Insight and User Engagement reports provide useful overviews of this data to help you prioritize apps.
Once you have identified the apps for which you want to optimize licenses, check the features listed on each app's integration page to confirm whether you can manage app licenses from Trelica. For apps managed via your IdP, check whether the app supports deprovisioning via the IdP.
If a suitable integration is available, you can change and recover app users' licenses from Trelica, either using an automated optimization workflow or on an ad hoc basis.
For apps without suitable integrations, you can add, update and remove app users in Trelica manually. This allows you to maintain an accurate record of who has access to your apps, their license and status, despite not being able to integrate the app with Trelica. For more information, see Import and update app usage data manually.
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