By Donna Yobs
Understanding daily operational needs across the enterprise is one key to achieving and maintaining continuous software license compliance. This is especially true for concurrent licensing, commonly used in technical and engineering applications. The following requirements relate to operational reporting and allow enterprises to understand and quickly react to business needs based on the current state of license servers, license usage and license availability. These types of reports have the following audiences:
- Engineering teams
- License managers
- Project teams
- IT department
The 5 Key Requirements of Concurrent Licensing Operational Reporting are:
1. Timely updates
- Doesn’t need to be real-time but should reflect a reasonable update pattern based on load
- Typically 5 minute updates from dozens of License Servers
2. Show current state of the data and environment in one view
- Can be approximation of data
- Usage logs are the ‘true’ source of compliance and procurement planning
- But for operational reporting you are concerned with operational health
3. Provide specific views, such as:
- Different dashboard views for different end user roles
- License managers by department or geographies
- Department views
- Application views
4. Provide alert mechanisms for key thresholds, such as:
- License denial rates
- Down license servers
5. Time Frames: What makes sense for my time horizon?
- This may vary from location to location
- Typically viewed in terms of a few: hours, days or weeks
In addition to providing these reporting capabilities, the license management system should also enable organizations to:
Check availability of—
- License Servers
- Vendor Daemons
- Licenses
And perform the following actions—
- Restart Systems, Services
- Request license release, if applicable. (Ensure validity of excess licenses before taking action).
- Discuss software planning with individual departments based on high usage patterns
- Educate users on license usage expectations based on current trends
Being able to take advantage of reporting at the right level for the right audience and feeding into the right process will aid your organization in gaining optimum control and ROI for your most valuable software assets. Data beyond a few weeks of age is best treated as Usage Data (reporting for: compliance, business planning and internal chargeback) and is handled with different reporting metrics.
These will be covered in the next blog— 5 key Usage Reporting Metrics for Concurrent License Management
