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Measuring license consumption independently of devices in SAM

Hi Folks,

I'm in a project implementing SMAX Premium+UD for a large customer as a tool for their license management processes. SAM functions are the focus points in the project. The main deliverable of the project is compliance report showing the number of licenses purchased and the number of licenses consumed for specific vendors (IBM, Oracle, Micro Focus, Microsoft and some more).

I'm facing the limitations below about calculating actual license consumption. Please help me whether these can be bent or worked around as these are currently project blockers:

There are products having a license metric independent of the devices. For example, Micro Focus GroupWise can be installed on any number of servers as consumption is based on the number of mailboxes in the system. Let's assume there are 10k user licenses purchased and there are 9k mailboxes in use, so 9k licenses are consumed. I need to show this information in the compliance pages and reports in SMAX/SAM. A custom application or a script can count the number of mailboxes in a GroupWise system through its REST API, so the amount of consumed licenses can be gathered easily. How/where can I put this data into SMAX to use it for compliance calculations?

Another example are some Oracle products which must be measured by both Named user and CPU to determine effective license position. SMAX can provide the numbers for CPU metric. Where can I put the number of users?

I tried to find a place in either UCMDB or SMAX database to store consumption data, but it seems license rule input and possible metric is very limited. If I put a number in the script itself, it is multiplied by the number of with the number of hosts where the software is installed on.

Do you have any suggestions? How do you deal with such licenses?

Thanks for any input!

Parents
  • Verified Answer

    In new release 2022.11, SAM provide the ability to federate more custom fields from CMS for Node CI and InstalledSoftware CI. if you have way to put consumption data on these CIs, you can get these data in license rule script. 

    At this time, you have to choose existing fields to store data and access them in license rule script (OOB fields: edition, version)

Reply
  • Verified Answer

    In new release 2022.11, SAM provide the ability to federate more custom fields from CMS for Node CI and InstalledSoftware CI. if you have way to put consumption data on these CIs, you can get these data in license rule script. 

    At this time, you have to choose existing fields to store data and access them in license rule script (OOB fields: edition, version)

Children
  • In summary, we succeed with the following using SMAX 2021.11:

    1. Add a custom node along with an installedsoftware CI in CMS to represent a software instance

    2. Store an integer (the license consumption count) in the 'Version' field of the CI.

    3. Sync the product into SAM

    4. Write a licensing rule in SMAX SAM that uses this version number as the source of compliance calculation

    5. Have the number shown as consumed license count

    We are still working on using the edition field rather than version, but essentially this is something that can be done for sure!