Getting the Most from Open iT: Power Features You Might Be Missing

[0:01] Nix: Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening everyone. Welcome to Open iT’s webinar titled Getting the Most from Open iT: Power Features You Might Be Missing. My name is Nix and I’ll be your host for today. In the next 20 minutes, our speaker will walk you through some of Open iT’s most powerful but often underused features. You’ll discover practical ways to deepen your analysis, streamline your workflows, and get even more value from the tools you already have. Feel free to send in your questions via the Q&A panel at the top of your screen. We’ll answer them after the main session. If we can’t get to all the questions live, don’t worry. We’ll follow up via email or LinkedIn.

[0:41] Now, a quick intro to today’s speaker. As a solutions architect, Sagi has one mission, to deliver results that add value to his clients. Highly experienced in customer relationship management, he has worked with high-profile clients from multiple verticals, helping them reach their goals by maximizing their software investments. Let’s give a warm welcome to Sagi.

[1:08] Sagi: Thank you very much, Nix.

[1:13] So today we will be talking about some of the less known features and reporting capabilities of Open iT. Crucial aspects of your license usage which are usually overlooked and one that Open iT can greatly assist with.

[1:32] So, as you know, Open iT has various products in our roster that can help you stay on top of your engineering license usage. You might be familiar with the LicenseAnalyzer™, our flagship product with the three-level tiered structure, helping you gain visibility into license usage, user usage patterns, and even reclaim unused licenses.

[2:02] But Open iT has a few other products that help you administer and analyze your licensing environments, such as the license planner, which allows you to add the cost factor into the mix, showing you license expenditure alongside actual potential savings in dollar amount. The license predictor, which enables you to look into predictions using AI, projecting future trends based on past events. The CLIMS module, which provides you with a remote interface for easily managing license managers. The storage analyzer that helps you keep track of server storage. And the compute analyzer that provides visibility into server CPU usage and batch job operations running on the server.

[2:59] So for our webinar today, we’ll focus on a few less known analytics and capabilities found in LicenseAnalyzer™ level one alongside presenting the capabilities of the CLIMS module.

[3:17] We’ll start with a very useful analysis which can be done on your environment. This allows you to find pirated software running in your network. Now, for many vendors, it’s very important to stay compliant with their licensing policy, as stepping outside might result in heavy fines or even some legal trouble. One crucial part of license compliance is, of course, making sure that no one is pirating the software. And it goes without saying that any company caught pirating software will face harsh measures by the vendor. So Open iT helps you with that, enabling you to find any users that have pirated software versions running on their station.

[4:13] How do we do that? Well, we take a look at usage data coming from the server versus usage data coming from the workstation, and any discrepancy between the two might suggest an unauthorized usage of an engineering application. As if the server did not provide the license to the user, how was it able to start up the application and utilize it?

[4:40] So in order to achieve this, we roll out the client component on both the license servers and the end-user workstations. The client component can be easily rolled out using the organization’s SCCM mechanism, utilizing user group policies to have the client silently installed on all servers and workstations on your network. From there, data on specific applications is then collected into the main Open iT core component and subsequently to the reporting interface. We will then generate two similar user-based reports, but one originates from the server usage and one originates from the workstations. Any misalignment between the reports might indicate a pirated version used on one of the workstations.

[5:41] As an example, on the left we can see a user-based report of license usage data coming from the server and on the right we can see the same report but now the data originates from the workstation. In our case, we find Christopher under the workstation report, but missing from the server report, indicating that Christopher might have pirated an application, and this version is running on his workstation, prompting the license administrator to investigate that matter further.

[6:20] You of course don’t have to create a user-based report. You can also just create a workstation-based report so as to keep the employee in question out of harm’s way and just tend to his workstation. And you can look at it in a much larger scale once you overlay the usage trends on top of each other, as you might have more than one user which is actually using pirated versions of the application. We see here that the workstation-based distinct users trend represented as the green line is much higher than the server-based distinct user trend line indicated in black, showing a very large discrepancy in the organization including users like Lisa, Deborah, Earl, Leona, and many more users that are misusing company resources and might be pirating software.

[7:23] This way you can get an overview and see if the issue is prevalent on your network, or maybe both lines are matching exactly and you do not have this issue at all. But once you find this discrepancy, you should of course start a company-wide investigation on the matter and delete any pirated versions installed on the network.

[7:50] Another capability of LicenseAnalyzer™ level one which is less known is finding out old and obsolete application versions which are still installed on the workstations and license servers. Being on top of this metric also helps tremendously for keeping compliant with vendor policies as most of them require you to have your environment up to date with the latest version. Also, it helps to enforce stronger security measures because some old versions might not have essential security updates coded into them, and basically leave the network wide open for being exploited as a result of this.

[8:42] So how is this one done here? Again, we put the client component on both the workstations and the license servers. You might find that some workstations have old versions of the application installed on them and they grab licenses from old obsolete servers which are still running on the network, such as having a 2002 version installed utilizing a license from a server that holds a 2002 license on it, which might be obsolete as we can see in this diagram. Now these cases many times happen due to recent mergers or acquisitions made by the organization where you basically inherit a new network that might have old and obsolete versions utilizing them.

[9:45] Open iT allows you to gain visibility into this matter and tend to any servers that need decommissioning or any workstations that need to have their applications updated, such as in this report that shows you obsolete versions of AutoCAD which are still running on various workstations in the network, prompting the license administrator to initiate a network-wide upgrading project with these workstations specifically pinpointed by Open iT.

[10:26] Now another important factor for staying compliant is making sure that users are utilizing any location-specific license servers, as you might have an agreement with a vendor which states a locality to your usage, meaning EU employees can grab licenses from EU servers, US-based employees can only grab licenses from US-based servers. Open iT enables you to group usage data by location and help you stay on top of usage localization. So you know who used it and from where in order to keep compliant.

[11:15] But not only that, you might also be able to get a global agreement from the vendor and Open iT helps you understand which agreement might be best. Is having multiple servers which are localized best for your users? This comes with a lot of maintenance and license migration requirements might be hefty, or maybe a less maintenance-heavy global agreement will be better and more beneficial for the organization. So Open iT can simulate the two options and provide you with analytical insights for you to understand which option you should go with.

[12:03] Here we have three localized license servers restricted to offering licenses to their own respective region, which many times is a cheaper option than going with a global license server. But they come with hidden costs, maintaining three servers, migrating licenses between them per the needs of the users in each region, and of course the exhausting administrative work behind it all.

[12:36] So in our case, Open iT simulates these three servers as just one global license server, allowing us to figure out if the new simulated usage trends show a significant advantage or maybe even a drop in concurrent license usage, making the global license option more effective. And this is exactly what we’ve seen with one of our clients.

[13:06] Here we have a report from a customer which had many different license servers, one for each region, for the US, for Belgium, for France, for Sweden, Hungary, and so on. They found it very hard maintaining all these license servers and consistently migrating licenses between them based on users’ needs and project needs. So they asked the question, will it be better going with a global license agreement instead?

[13:39] Well, we ran the numbers and this is what we found. You can see here the total amount of licenses that they purchased in the top black line. Under it, you can see all the concurrent license usage of the various servers stacked on top of each other in the colored bars here. While the red line represents their question, what would be the usage in case all of these were actually one global license server? Well, we see a major drop in license usage just by changing the agreement to a global one, which is around 15 to 20% in licensing reduction. So even though the global licenses are more expensive, the lower requirement of licenses and the lack of intense server maintenance made it worth changing their license agreement and restructuring their licensing environment around a global usage pool.

[14:46] And finally, we’ll talk about the CLIMS module, which enables you to remotely administer the license managers using a single cohesive interface. First of all, you will be able to remotely start, stop, and re-read license managers just by clicking on a button on CLIMS. You will have all options files, all license files, all log files stored under one roof, acting as a central repository of different license manager files. So due to this fact, CLIMS allows for remotely uploading new license files onto the license manager by simply selecting the files from your PC and without the need to remote to the server itself. Options files and license files can be easily edited using a comparative interface that shows you which changes were made in the files and saves the history of changes. But also your administration can be proactive and you will be able to release hung licenses which did not make their way back to the licensing pool after the user closed the application.

[16:17] Now, not only will you be able to view license manager files, you’ll be able to edit them easily with the interface. CLIMS offers a comprehensive interface. It is a comparative one which highlights any changes which were made in the license file or the options file and allows you to easily modify the allocations, reservations, borrowing status, license packaging, or any other configuration that the license files and options files hold.

[16:54] Sometimes you might confront a situation where you need to retract a license back into the license pool. Let’s say for example the user closed his application but the license did not go back into the licensing pool. Meaning that the license cannot be used by anyone else and is now considered as a hung license. Usually the solution will be just restarting the license manager and get all the hung licenses retrieved. But that poses an issue as it will kick all users off their sessions. So CLIMS offers a solution for that. It allows you to remotely release those licenses back into the licensing pool in a very focused manner and without anybody else losing their current work.

[17:51] And that’s it for now. We have gone over various powerful less known capabilities of Open iT, giving you deep insights into your license usage, helping you stay compliant with software vendors, pointing out various users which committed infractions, showing you license usage discrepancies, and allowing you to remotely manage your licensing environment. So now I would like to hear from you. Do you have any questions relating to the topics raised on the webinar today? Go ahead and write them in the Q&A session.

[18:33] Nix: Thank you Sagi for your insightful presentation. We’ve got some great questions lined up. Let’s get right into it. So first, for the earlier topic, does this piracy detection work for any application or is it limited to applications that typically use a license manager like FlexLM?

[18:55] Sagi: So we can do it with any license manager that we monitor, because as long as the license manager gives out usage data and we can match that with usage data coming from the workstation, it doesn’t matter which license manager it is as long as it’s one of the supported ones.

[19:18] Nix: So next, this pirated software monitoring relies on deploying the client component to all end-user workstations. What is the performance impact to the CPU usage or network of this agent?

[19:32] Sagi: Very minimal, as the agent basically just monitors the specific application process that you tell it to monitor. It doesn’t do it for everything and it’s very light, does not take a lot of CPU or network, as it bundles the information and sends it once every 5 minutes.

[19:59] Nix: And for the question regarding global licenses, if we consolidate our license servers into one global pool, what is the impact on user experience for our teams in Asia or Europe? Will they experience significant latency when pulling a license?

[20:17] Sagi: So no, because let’s say a user will try to get a license, he’s in China, he’s trying to get it from the US. So the latency will be maybe 1 second at most as the latency will be very minimal. He’s not playing a PC game. He is just retracting a one-time license. So it’s a click and it will be a second longer which is very unnoticeable.

[20:51] Nix: And another question says, you mentioned starting and stopping a license manager. Which specific license managers does the CLIMS module support? Is it just for FlexLM or does it also work with DSLS, RLM, LMX, and others?

[21:08] Sagi: Yes. So it also works with other license managers. It either runs a command to start or stop the license manager, but it can also restart the service itself. So any license manager that has a service, basically.

[21:26] Nix: And another question says, can the tool also detect unused license managers, not only workstations?

[21:34] Sagi: Yes. So if you spread out the client on your network on different servers, basically it detects the license managers that you have there. You can spread it out on all different servers and if some of the clients don’t come back with any information, then we know that there is no license manager there. It helps with discovery.

[22:01] Nix: Does the CLIMS module have granular role-based access control? For example, can we allow a junior admin to view files but only allow a senior admin to edit files or release hung licenses?

[22:16] Sagi: Yes, you can set up different roles for different users. You can define what they’re able to do. Some only read, some edit, and some fully modify and administer the tool.

[22:32] Nix: And lastly, is the CLIMS module a separate purchase?

[22:38] Sagi: Yes, it’s a separate purchase. It’s not within the LicenseAnalyzer™ level 1, 2, 3 suite. It is separate to it and also uses its own client and core component.

[22:55] Nix: And I think, oh, there’s another question. The ability to remotely release a single hung license without restarting the server is very powerful. But what happens if we accidentally release a license that was in active use by someone whose machine had just crashed?

[23:13] Sagi: So if we have a machine that just crashed, that means he’s no longer using that license. We can retrieve that hung license by just clicking it. Now let’s say that we have a user and we clicked it by mistake, we clicked retrieve hung license by mistake and he’s still using it. So it will not stop his session because the application itself will go out and check every few seconds that it has a license, and if it finds that it doesn’t have a license it will automatically retract the license back, take it back, and continue working. The application itself, even if you take its license, it will grab it back a few seconds later, as this is the way it’s designed. It’s not designed to work without a license. So even if you make a mistake, no problem. The application will correct it.

[24:21] Nix: That’s good to know. And I think that was the last of our questions. That wraps up our Q&A session. Thank you for your thoughtful responses. And Sagi, thank you again, and thank you to everyone who joined us today. This webinar was recorded and a link will be sent to your email shortly. You’ll also find it soon on our webinars on demand page at openit.com. There you can also find our last couple of webinars, Is it Time to Switch to User-Based Licensing and Idle No More: Reclaiming and Reallocating Underused Licenses. Scan the QR codes on your screen or visit resources, webinars on our website to watch the replay. We’re also offering a free 30-minute consultation with an Open iT business solutions consultant. If you’re ready to explore license optimization in your environment, get in touch using the contact details on the screen and follow us at Open iT, Inc. on social media to stay updated. Once again, I’m Nix. Thank you and stay safe.