集中ライセンス統合管理システムCLIMS): 1 つのポータル。総合的なライセンス管理

[0:00] Nix: Hello and welcome everyone. Whether it’s morning, afternoon, or evening in your part of the world, thank you for joining us. Today’s session is all about simplifying the chaos of license management. We’re proud to present centralized license integration management system or CLIMS, a solution designed to bring control, clarity, and confidence to your license ecosystem.

[0:25] Nix: I’m Nix, your host. And over the next 20 minutes, you’ll see how CLIMS consolidates license manager visibility and management into one centralized portal, making it easier to manage multiple license servers, track usage, and maintain compliance, all from a single source of truth. Now, let’s meet today’s speaker. Linda is a dynamic speaker who engages audiences with practical insights on software license optimization, helping them tackle real world challenges with confidence.

[0:55] Nix: With over 35 years in IT management and leadership roles, Linda brings a broad range of expertise across the board. She has guided clients for over 11 years at Open iT to achieve substantial cost savings and optimize software licensing through data-driven insights and software usage metering. Also, Romeo is not only our delivery manager but also our subject matter expert for CLIMS and will be addressing your questions at the end.

[1:22] Nix: Romeo authored CLIMS to help administrators with whom he worked with to ease their day-to-day jobs. He has spent 18 of his 20 plus years in software development and IT at Open iT. He brings a wealth of experience to problem solving both for Open iT and our customers. As always, feel free to drop your questions in the Q&A panel during the session. We’ll address them live at the end and follow up afterward if we run out of time. Now, let’s welcome Linda to the session.

[1:52] Linda: Hello everybody and thank you very much for that introduction, Nix. I’m happy to be with you here today to talk about CLIMS. But I want to kind of start with our flagship product to compare and contrast. We’ve got folks on the call today. Some are customers and some are prospects. But we want to start with our flagship product which is LicenseAnalyzer™. And that’s where we’re providing all of that front-end usage information with detailed user real time as well as historical information usage trends all types of reporting dashboards and alerts. So if we think of LicenseAnalyzer™ as the front end if you will.

[2:34] Linda: Going to contrast that where CLIMS is the enterprise level backend administration of those license managers and servers and as Nix mentioned, Romeo through his delivery efforts wanted to create a tool to help the license administrators because there’s a lot going on on that as well. So let’s just jump into that and when we look there’s a lot of feature functionality when you look at CLIMS.

[3:06] Linda: First and foremost, it’s that enterprise view of what’s going on on those backend license servers. So, instead of having to look up the credentials for every single server when you’re trying to manage them in whatever capacity you’re doing, CLIMS provides you that enterprise view and I’m going to show you that in a live demo, but it provides that enterprise view of all of your license servers and license managers. And you have a lot of functionality there as well. You have the ability to remotely start and stop services. You can upload new license files remotely. You can edit all those license files and option files. We have a comparative user interface. So, it’s really nice, especially when you have multiples. You can see what changed in those files and review that before you commit those changes.

[4:02] Linda: You have scenarios where you have a hung license. There’s all types of scenarios where you might need to kick a user out to release a license. So maybe you have a terminal server or an application server. And if the user instead of logging out exes out of the window, that actually hangs a license, meaning that license is still being consumed even though no one’s using it. So, you have the ability to release or revoke a license. Maybe you have somebody who went home sick and didn’t realize what happened and left their licensing open.

[4:40] Linda: The most common problem we hear from new prospects is that the users come in to work and they open all the applications that they may use, whether they’re going to use them or not, and they just kind of leave them open. They don’t really understand the cost implications of leaving those open. So, being able to release those licenses if you have a long checkout is a nice feature. And you can do it all from again a central enterprise view. You can simultaneously see that same equivalent real-time usage information of who’s got what licenses checked out currently. If you need to, if you’re having any issues, you can look at all of the different debug log files of vendor log files.

[5:31] Linda: One of the things that I love the most is that it brings accountability. So especially the larger your organization it gets even more cumbersome. So you go from tens of servers to hundreds of servers and so therefore typically it’s split up. Certain people are responsible for certain things and so being able to see a history of what’s changed and who changed it brings accountability and it really brings more efficiency to managing those. It’ll actually alert you as well, again I’m going to show you this. If somebody goes directly to the server and makes a change, it’ll actually tell you in the dashboard. There are some alerts on there that will go through for changes made outside of CLIMS, server down, demon down.

[6:23] Linda: The other thing, you can check again daily log files. If you need to update, so CLIMS is a collector or an agent that sits on those license servers. You have the ability to upgrade all of them. Or you can do them individually, but it’s much easier to check that box and upgrade all. And then the other thing, it brings a role-based control. So there may be some people in your organization that you need to have visibility of what’s going on but you don’t really want them to be able to make changes. Or as I mentioned when you get more servers you have John Smith is responsible for this set of servers or set of vendors where Michael’s responsible for another set. So you can control all of that access to who can look at or who can make changes to those servers.

[7:16] Linda: I have a few customer comments here for customers that are using this product. Unparalleled visibility making it easier and less time consuming for the team to manage and update licenses. So again being able to go to a central console to be able to make those changes brings significant advantages into our operations. The centralized interface allows us to monitor the license managers more efficiently and one customer said that it was a total game changer. So hopefully I’ll be able to show you some of that today.

[8:02] Linda: This is a list, a matrix of our currently supported license managers. As we all know every license manager is different and what you can and can’t do in those is different. So we provide a matrix for this. We have this online. You can see it in terms of what the functionality is. But let’s jump into the product so we can see exactly what’s going on. So this is our landing page. This is the user interface for CLIMS. And what we can see here, this is all of our different license servers in the environment. We can look at this in a tile view. We can flip it over and look at it in a list view. We have a list of what’s currently running and active and what the operating system is.

[8:56] Linda: So here we see all of the different servers. I’ll just point out a few things to you. One is how many distinct users do I have on those servers currently. You’ll notice that some of these cards are green and some are red. Green means that those servers are up and communicating, the demon is up and it’s all communicating. The red means that the demon is not communicating and we have a yellow as well which is a 2-hour, so a server completely offline versus a demon not communicating. So we can drill into any of these different servers and we get a whole host of information.

[9:33] Linda: The first thing to notice here is you can stop and start services very easily. You can also see the various different information. This is where you can see all of the different features or applications that are running currently on that server. You can click into any of those and that is where we have that ability to revoke a license if you have permission. So in your roles, if you have permission, you have the ability to revoke that license very easily.

[10:04] Linda: But we can also go up here and look at additional information. We have as I mentioned the ability to manage our license files and option files. So we can click into here. This is that comparative matrix that we looked at. So we can see a comparison, if you can do a separate edit or you can even see a history of what’s changed. It will highlight that and then as you make changes you have the ability to put a note in there and it’ll list all of those different changes for you. And then we have the same functionality on the option files. We have the comparative interface as well as the editor and the history of what’s going on.

[10:53] Linda: Let me see. I’ve got one here. This little red badge shows that we have changes on one of the files, but they’ve been uncommitted. So, we can click here and see that’s on the license file here. We can click into that license file again, look and see what those changes are. And if we want to commit them, we can publish and reread and commit those changes directly there.

[11:25] Linda: We also have the ability to, I don’t have any debug logs but oh here we do. We have the debug log files and we also have a console that’ll give you various different changes. So this all appears under our manage tab and again you can look at this in a tile view or we can look at it in a list view. In addition to that, we have under this client tab different information. So here we’re looking at a list view. If I want to look at that same server, we can click here and now we can see all types of information.

[12:16] Linda: I do also want to show you again, the goal for when we designed this was to make it easier. You can also navigate to this by just clicking on the server directly. So here we have various different information on the individual server if you want to look at the IP version, the operating system, you have all the information on your storage, what’s going on, a process table of what’s happened. You can actually run jobs from here directly. You can look and see what’s configured on that server right now and be able to look at that. We have different components to help you for a troubleshooting perspective. So various different log files and sampler files. You can look and see which vendors are configured on that particular server and of course what vendor logs that we have in place for that server. So a lot of different information for you to again easily centrally manage that.

[13:22] Linda: Now on the download, this is where we again, let me see, I forgot to point this out. So here these happen to all be on this server the same version but here’s where we have that upgrade all where you have all the different servers. So if you needed to update the collector, the CLIMS data collector, you have the ability to just click on this and upgrade all. You do have the ability to download the clients directly from here and install as well.

[13:52] Linda: And then lastly, I wanted to show you the administration tab. So here we can do things like configure alerts. We can also configure our email settings. You have the ability when you’re at the server level to actually mute them for a specified time. But again whether there’s a license file has been modified, a demon down, the server down, etc. So if you want to look at that, again you can configure email and teams or you can look and do the actual configurations for specific vendors.

[14:36] Linda: We also have as I mentioned the ability to control the access by the various different people. So here we can simply create, we have users and roles. You can also put somebody’s email address and then you have the ability to decide do they have limited read-only access or do they have full access. You can select, this is where I mentioned, so let’s say you’re only responsible for flex and DSLs, you can put that here or we have advanced filters as well if you wanted to be able to limit even further. Instead of maybe you have so many flex, they’re only responsible for certain ones. So here you can select specific host and then here you can decide what you want them to see. Do you want them to see everything or just the manage and not the download or just the manage and the clients or what have you. Now, if you’re an administrator, you can of course edit them and delete them.

[15:39] Linda: If you’re an administrator, you’ll also have the access to simulate and see what that is. So, it’s really nice. You can verify and double check when you’re setting this up. So, if you click here, we can go and look at various different folks. So, let me just select this user and I’m going to start the simulation. And so, now we can see instead of having all of the different navigation components here, we only have manage. And so, you can click in and look at that. But we can again, you can simulate what that is. You can tell up here that we’re simulating for an AVDA in this particular thing. And then of course we can exit that and you can modify the access as needed.

[16:33] Linda: We also have some access to the Raven DB for various different components to look at and then of course a history of everything that’s going on which I told you is one of my favorite things. So pretty simplistic if you think about it but a huge benefit to the folks in your organization who are responsible for managing those. So where does that fit into the product? It does require our enterprise level LicenseAnalyzer™ level one if you will. So it’s just simply a plugin. So that’s kind of where it fits into the product suite if you will.

[17:13] Linda: And in conclusion, the big things, what we’re doing is bringing visibility, control and accountability on those backend license servers and license managers that your team or one of your teammates that is responsible for managing in your organization. So from there I think we’re ready for questions and I’m going to invite Romeo to join me as well to answer your questions. So, Nix, do we have any questions?

[17:43] Nix: Thank you, Linda. As I previously mentioned, we also have Romeo, our CLIMS subject matter expert here to help answer your questions. We’ve received some excellent inquiries. So, let’s jump right into it. What do we got?

[17:58] Question: So, first we have, does CLIMS support triads? Do you have to update each server individually, Romeo?

[18:08] Romeo: Hi. Yes, good morning. Do we support triads? Of course. Yes. So, as long as the CLIMS client is installed on all those servers in the triad, you just have to make changes and it will publish to all three servers. Of course, if it’s three as triads. So, yes, you only have to modify once and it will deploy to all members of the triad automatically.

[18:36] Linda: And then I think the second half, does it reread as well? So it restarts across all three servers. Is that accurate?

[18:44] Romeo: That is correct.

[18:46] Linda: So it’s like when you’re doing it manually but automatically.

[18:53] Romeo: That’s awesome. Anything else, Nix?

[18:57] Question: Moving on to the next question. After an option file has been updated, will CLIMS automatically restart services to implement the changes?

[19:09] Romeo: Okay, I’ll take that too. So, the answer is by default, yes, but you have an option to select if you just want to publish it but don’t restart or reread. You can also by default just publish and reread as Linda shown earlier on the live demo. There is a checkbox and a button, tick box, publish and reread. Yeah, awesome. Great question.

[19:40] Nix: Thanks for explaining that, Romeo. Question: Next, we have another question. After an application has been maxed out on licenses, can CLIMS alert when licenses then become available again?

[19:53] Romeo: Okay, I’ll take that again. I’m guessing this question is about when a user gets denied from the application. So good question because yes at first they will get an alert or email that there’s no license available but sit back, I’ll let you know when something came up or when the license is available again. So as soon as the license becomes freed, he or she will receive an email again saying you can get on now, hurry up, you might front run before it’s taken again.

[20:36] Linda: And I think that brings up another good point is that as organizations are being asked to tighten their belt more and more. I work with a lot of customers and they’re taking instead of having a license for everybody at every time. I certainly have customers that are like that. Doesn’t matter what it costs. I want a license regardless. But I certainly have customers now that are looking at being able to accept culturally, if you will, like a 1%. So let’s license at a 99 percentile of what our max in use is across whatever time frame. And so this additional feature really drives the ability to tighten your licenses, your effective license position even tighter because with the ability to tell, if a user did get a denial for whatever reason, it’ll tell them when that a license has been checked back in or it’s available again. So that’s a great question. I forgot to even talk about that. So wonderful. Anything else?

[21:43] Nix: Thank you, Romeo, Linda. Question: And lastly, we have a question here. Speaking of alerts, what alerts are available? Demon down, server changes, denials.

[21:55] Linda: Yeah, I think I talked about those. So again, the difference is we’re actually, so those of you who have LicenseAnalyzer™, we do have some alerting there on server down, demon down. We do it a little bit differently in CLIMS, we’re actually running a command. And Romeo can get into more specifics, but yes, the answer is we are doing those license file changes notifications and demon down or server down notification or what we just discussed which is a user notification. It has to be configured and that’s where you received a denial and now that license has become available to help them. So great question.

[22:54] Nix: We also have another one here. It’s from Joanne. Question: Can you show us where to restart a service that has stopped if possible?

[23:04] Linda: Sure. Let me just jump back over there real quick. And if we click into here into any of the servers up here at the top, you have the ability to stop or start, restart services. Reread. And that’s a reread. Yep.

[23:20] Romeo: So if you go to the red ones, Linda, it might actually explain or show better what was asking. So let’s say it is stopped right now. You can actually start it here. So this is what the start would look like if it stopped.

[23:37] Linda: Yep. Yep, good question.

[23:44] Nix: Great. I think that was the last one of them and I guess that ends our Q&A session. Thank you for those thoughtful responses. Before we wrap up, just a quick reminder, this webinar was recorded and you’ll receive a link to the replay in your inbox shortly. You’ll also find it in our webinars on demand page at openit.com.

[24:06] Nix: Alongside the webinar recordings is a link to our survey. Send us your feedback and any topic you’d like us to cover. If you’d like to catch up on previous sessions in the series, we’ve covered five signs you have a license hoarder on your team. And we also have another webinar upcoming, why the smartest product teams never go to a budget meeting empty-handed. That will be headed by Mark and David for the next webinar. Just scan the QR code on your screen or visit resources webinars on our website. If you’re interested in exploring how CLIMS can fit into your environment, we’re offering a free 30-minute consultation with an Open iT business solutions consultant. Just use the contact details on your screen and don’t forget to follow us at Open iT, Inc. on social media for more insights and updates. Once again, I’m Nix. Thank you for joining us today. See you at our next session.

[25:00] Linda: Thank you everybody. Hey, we really appreciate it.