US Patent 8713535 Reliable and accurate usage detection of a software application

Use of software applications is detected by categorizing components of applications into a usage manifest and implementing a usage detection background service on a client PC that monitors the components according to the usage manifest. The application components are categorized based on the mode of user interaction as well as the component's correlation to active use of an application. The background service tracks events and activities associated with the application components to generate usage metrics that include the frequency of unique launches of an application and the duration of each unique use. A usage manager for the background service may utilize the usage metrics for a component independently, or combine metrics for multiple components in cases where applications work in an interactive manner (such as a plug-in to a web browser) in order to compute application usage by comparing the metrics against predefined thresholds.