When monitoring licenses through a license manager, a one-to-one correspondence between the applications bought and the individual licenses delivered by the vendor may not always be true. Often, many of the application in a suite will share individual licenses and only the combined “set” of licenses identify a particular application.
In order to track the actual use of a particular application, CIOs may have to (a) monitor process usage for the relevant processes in every host in the system, or (b) find a way to recalculate the use of the applications through license usage.
At first glance, option (a) seems promising. Unfortunately, it has a few possible hurdles:
1) Something that could monitor applications on all the machines that run the said application needs to be set up.
2) If the application allows license sharing, multiple running applications may not necessarily obtain multiple licenses.
3) A single application binary may be used to run several applications as seen from a licensing side (i.e. different licenses make the binary behave differently).
Looking on the license usage data, how do we then solve the problem regarding applications with two or more licenses? In some cases it is possible to identify unique key licenses for each product and monitor only those. When this is not possible, the application vendors’ help may be needed to calculate the usage, or a more advanced reporting tool may be employed.
At Open iT, we utilize more advanced ways of keeping track of application usage through the use of some key information:
- the list of licenses that an application may use
- the maximum number of applications that can run concurrently (if applicable)
- the relative cost between each application
Using this information, we can find a good appraisal of the actual application usage. Open iT Tools allow for much more accurate reports on your application utilization. The goal is to minimize the cost for the customer while fulfilling vendor requirements.
Learn more on how you can generate accurate software license usage data with Open iT tools.
