- La gestion des licences par clé électronique repose sur un périphérique USB portable contenant une licence logicielle protégée pour une version spécifique de l'application.
- Les clés matérielles locales sont utilisées sur un seul ordinateur, tandis que les clés matérielles réseau permettent d'obtenir des informations sur l'utilisation des licences via des outils gérés par serveur.
- Open iT LicenseAnalyzer permet de générer des rapports sur l'utilisation des clés de protection, notamment concernant l'hôte, le numéro de série, le fabricant, les fonctionnalités, l'utilisateur, les licences disponibles, la durée, le taux d'utilisation et le temps écoulé.
Un dongle se branche sur un port USB et contient la licence d'une version d'une application — un concept simple, mais compliqué à gérer à grande échelle. Les clés matérielles locales sont liées à un seul ordinateur ; les clés réseau fonctionnent via un serveur et génèrent des informations d’utilisation sur lesquelles l’administrateur peut réellement agir. Open iT LicenseAnalyzer rend compte de l’utilisation des clés par hôte, numéro de série, fournisseur, fonctionnalité, utilisateur, licences disponibles, durée, taux d’utilisation et temps écoulé — transformant ainsi un modèle de sécurité physique en une vue d’utilisation mesurable et optimisable, à l’instar de toute application sous licence réseau.
Voir l'octroi de licences pour les dongles dans les règles de l'art !
When it comes to software licensing, most users demand and lean towards the most flexible, manageable, secure, and protected solutions. It is more appealing when the licensing solution and design provides the need of the users to efficiently and optimally utilize expensive software licenses.
One of the known secure and protected software licensing solutions introduced by ISVs is dongle licensing. It is an electronic portable device that contains protected copy of the software license for a specific version of an application. Software licensing is done commonly through network and parallel ports or even through individual software installation. But dongle licensing uses USB ports making it more portable and very easy to share among various users.
Dongle-based licensing has two modes of installation: local and network. Local dongle licensing is done by plugging a dongle into the USB port of the computer. The license on this installation cannot be shared with other users in the network, but it can be used by another user by plugging the specific dongle into the computer with the same application to be licensed. A network type of installation is like a server-client model, it has a configured license server which contains the dongle server software and the computer using the license through the network should have the runtime files of the dongle license server.
Commonly, only the network-based installation of dongle licensing has the capability for reporting and providing overview of the license usage. There are utilities installed together with the dongle that provide license information, but the more complete report is provided by the dongle license server. For instance, the WibuKey system has its license monitor tool (WkSvMOn) installed together with the WibuKey license server. WkSvMOn is a tool that provides all the necessary information and overview about the active licenses during operation.
Another tool, used by Codemeter dongle, is the WebAdmin. It is a web-based portal that provides various capabilities and overviews on the license usage of the Codemeter license connector connected to the Codemeter license server through the network. This powerful tool is installed together with the Codemeter license server.
Ces outils fournissent les informations suivantes :
- Nombre d'utilisateurs simultanés utilisant la licence ;
- Start time when the users first accessed the license;
- Durée ou durée d'utilisation d'une licence par un utilisateur ;
- le nombre de licences disponibles
- Nombre de licences partagées.
Having these reporting tools is very useful when there is a specific provider and a license server. However, if the company has local dongles only and no license server, or has both Codemeter and Wibukey, monitoring and reporting of license usage will be tedious because there is no centralized view for all.
This is when a powerful Engineering Software Management tool that supports dongle-based licensing, together with other licensing methods, would be very useful. This tool could use polling and log parsing mechanisms to fetch license information and usage for each installed dongle.
Sondage
License status utilities can be designed to fetch data from the dongles C-based API. This API is responsible for providing license inventory of all the connected dongles. With these utilities, specific poll parsers can be executed to convert the collected raw dongle data to the appropriate format for report generation. The dongle needs to be plugged into the computer where the data collector is installed to properly capture the license usage.
Analyse du journal
With log parsing, log files are parsed and processed to fetch essential information to produce license usage reports. This method of data collection is more helpful since it is historical. All the data from the first time log files have been generated up to the current time can be read, parsed, and reported. Data collectors should be installed in the license server for this to work.
Rapports sur les données
Grâce aux données collectées, divers rapports essentiels peuvent être créés. L'outil de reporting Open iT® LicenseAnalyzer™ Dongle a la capacité de générer des rapports sur les informations suivantes :
- Host – hostname of the license
- Serial Number – serial number of the dongle
- Vendor – vendor name or firmname of the dongle
- Vendor Code – vendor code or firmcode of the dongle
- Feature – application name or the licensed feature
- Feature Version – application versio
- User – username of the license user
- Licences disponibles
- Duration – total amount of time of license usage
- Moyenne des licences utilisées
- Nombre maximal de licences utilisées
- Utilisation moyenne
- Utilisation maximale
- Elapsed Time – combined time of license usage
Using this information, managing and controlling over various dongle-based licenses, such as WibuKey, Codemeter and Vector, is easier and more manageable.
En savoir plus sur la manière de gérer efficacement les licences basées sur des dongles en conjonction avec d'autres méthodes d'octroi de licences. Laissez-nous vous guider dans votre démarche de gestion et d'optimisation des logiciels d'ingénierie.
