Application and SaaS Usage Monitoring: Identify Underused Licenses, Improve Security, and Identify Training Needs
The Hidden Cost of Unused Software Licenses
In today’s digital workplace, organizations depend heavily on numerous software applications and services. This reliance means that software licensing and subscriptions consume a substantial part of the IT budget. According to the latest report by SaaS Security Report by grip, small companies used 411 apps, medium companies 582 apps, and large companies 1,437 apps. These figures represent a substantial increase(40%) from 2022. However, organizations often find themselves paying for licenses and subscriptions that are rarely, if ever, utilized by employees, resulting in significant financial waste.
The Alarming Statistics on SaaS Waste
According to the knowledge hub:
- Businesses use an average of 106 SaaS applications, and SaaS now accounts for 85% of all business software.
- 49% of SaaS licenses go unused.
- Companies with over 1,000 employees waste approximately $21 million annually on unused licenses.
How to Monitor Application and SaaS Usage Effectively
To combat this waste and optimize your software investments, organizations need comprehensive visibility into application usage. Effective monitoring enables you to:
Understand user behavior: Identify who actually uses applications and services versus who has licenses assigned
Identify cost-saving opportunities: Discover underused licenses and reduce unnecessary license and SaaS costs
Recognize training gaps: Spot adoption challenges and identify where employees need additional training or support
Enhance security posture: Improve security and access control by restricting access to active users only
Maintain efficiency: Keep your environment streamlined by removing rarely used services and applications
Implementing Digital Employee Experience (DEX) for Complete Visibility
To achieve comprehensive application usage monitoring and optimization, organizations need to implement a robust Digital Employee Experience (DEX) solution.
What is Digital Employee Experience?
As employees increasingly rely on digital tools for everything from communication to data analysis, the digital employee experience has become critical to organizational success. DEX empowers organizations to optimize their digital workplace environments for maximum efficiency, productivity, and user experiences across all digital touchpoints. It delivers real-time insights into the performance and reliability of endpoints, applications, and network connectivity.
The Essential Pillars of DEX
1. Application Performance:
This enables organizations to monitor the availability and performance of any application, whether Desktop, SaaS, Web, Terminal, Green Screen, or Unified Communications apps, based on real user activities. This ensures that performance issues are identified and resolved before they impact productivity.
Key benefits include:W
- Real-time performance metrics from actual user sessions
- Early detection of slowdowns and availability issues
- Reduced mean time to resolution (MTTR) for application problems
- Improved end-user satisfaction and productivity
2. Application Usage:
This provides inventory management and detailed reporting on usage patterns, helping optimize spending and adoption across all users, endpoints, and applications. This visibility allows IT teams to make data-driven decisions about software investments and license allocation.
This capability helps organizations:
- Track which applications are actively used versus sitting idle
- Identify power users, occasional users, and non-users
- Optimize license allocation based on actual usage data
- Reclaim unused licenses and redirect budget to high-value tools
3. Endpoint Monitoring and Management:
Endpoint monitoring tracks the health, performance, and inventory of physical or VDI/DaaS endpoints, ensuring that devices remain reliable and functional for employees regardless of their work location. Whether employees work from the office, home, or remote locations, endpoint monitoring provides visibility into device performance, available resources, and potential issues.
Benefits include:
- Comprehensive device health monitoring
- Proactive identification of hardware or software issues
- Complete inventory management for all endpoints
- Support for hybrid and remote work environments
Real Use Case: Custom Issue Scanners
Our DEX solution includes flexible custom scanners for specific challenges. For example, we’ve configured a scanner that detects when OneDrive overloads endpoints during synchronization—particularly relevant in VDI environments like AVD, VMware Horizon, and Citrix. The scanner monitors CPU/memory usage and folder item counts, alerting IT when OneDrive syncs exceed safe thresholds (100,000+ items for users, 300,000+ for shared folders) so issues can be resolved quickly before impacting users.
4. Network Connectivity Monitoring:
Connectivity monitoring offers comprehensive visibility into endpoint network and Wi-Fi availability, and performance from any location. This helps identify and troubleshoot connectivity issues that could disrupt employee workflows, particularly critical in today’s distributed work environments.
Key capabilities:W
- Real-time network performance metrics
- Wi-Fi signal strength and quality monitoring
- Bandwidth utilization tracking
- Location-independent connectivity insights
The ROI of Digital Employee Experience Monitoring
Implementing a comprehensive DEX solution delivers measurable returns across multiple dimensions:
Cost Savings: By identifying unused licenses and optimizing software spending, organizations can reclaim significant portions of their IT budget. For large enterprises, this can translate to millions in annual savings.
Productivity Gains: Proactive performance monitoring ensures employees have reliable access to the tools they need, minimizing downtime and frustration.
Enhanced Security: By restricting access to active users and removing unused accounts, organizations reduce their attack surface and improve overall security posture.
Informed Decision-Making: Data-driven insights enable IT leaders to make strategic decisions about technology investments, training programs, and digital workplace optimization.
Improved User Experience: When IT teams can identify and resolve issues before they impact users, employee satisfaction and engagement improve significantly.
Summary
Digital Employee Experience monitoring has evolved from a nice-to-have into a must-have. With organizations deploying hundreds or even thousands of applications, the financial and operational costs of poor visibility are simply too high to ignore. Nearly half of all SaaS licenses go unused, representing millions in wasted spending for large enterprises.
A comprehensive DEX solution addresses these challenges by providing real-time insights into application performance, detailed usage analytics, endpoint health monitoring, and network connectivity tracking. This four-pillar approach enables organizations to optimize software spending, improve productivity, enhance security, and create better digital experiences for employees.
By implementing proper DEX monitoring, organizations gain the visibility needed to make data-driven decisions about their technology investments, identify training needs, reclaim unused licenses, and ensure that their digital workplace operates at peak efficiency. The result is a leaner, more productive, and more cost-effective technology environment that directly supports business objectives.
How WeAre Can Help
WeAre is a technology company focusing on observability solutions that drive business resilience and operational excellence. Our services support technology teams to manage business-critical digital services with confidence and clarity.
Our Observability as a Service (OaaS) offering provides real-time insights across your entire technology stack, from applications and endpoints to network connectivity and user experience. We ensure your systems remain reliable, optimized, and resilient through:
- Comprehensive monitoring across all digital touchpoints
- Proactive issue detection and prevention
- Actionable insights for optimization and cost reduction
- Expert support to help you maximize your technology investments
By proactively preventing problems and providing the visibility you need to optimize your digital workplace, we help you focus on your business goals without compromising performance or user experience.
You can learn more about our Observability as a service (OaaS) from here, and let us show you how observability can help you run resilient businesses that are built for real-world success.