What is Automation License Manager #
Siemens describes the license key as the technical form of the license. Your contract gives you the right to use the software. The license key is what the software looks for before it will start.
ALM installs those keys, moves them between machines, and shows which ones a computer currently holds. When you install a Siemens product that needs a key, Siemens’ documentation puts it plainly: “Software products requiring license keys automatically report this requirement to the Automation License Manager.” ALM then finds an available key, or the software refuses to run.
Three points matter once you’re managing more than a handful of machines.
- Keys live in a place, not in an account. A license key sits on a computer, on another computer reachable over the network, or on a USB stick. Moving a license means moving the key: drag and drop, cut and paste, or an offline transfer using a start code, a request code and an activation code for machines with no network connection. No portal reassigns entitlements for you.
- Floating licenses use a server and clients. Siemens calls the machine holding a floating key a license key server, and a machine borrowing it a license key client. Each client keeps a search list of computers it checks, in order, when no key is free locally. That’s the whole mechanism. It’s closer to a shared folder of keys than to a modern license server.
- ALM logs operations, not usage. Its Log view records “all operations that involve license keys (such as use of a license key by software, transfer of license keys, check out of license keys).” You can filter it by period, print it, or export it to CSV. What you can’t ask it is how many of your 40 engineering seats were in use last Tuesday at 10am, how long the average session ran, or how often someone was turned away.
Which license types does ALM support #
Siemens splits this into two questions: what kind of license you bought, and what restriction sits on top of it. ALM handles both, and the difference matters when you reconcile an entitlement list against what’s deployed.
By license type #
| Type | What Siemens’ documentation says |
|---|---|
| Single | Use of the software with a Single license is permitted on any computer; the permitted type of use is governed by the applicable Certificate of License. |
| Floating | Includes the right of simultaneous use for an unlimited period. The software can be installed at multiple locations. |
| Master | Use of the software is unrestricted. |
| Upgrade | Converts a license of an older version to a newer one, or expands a configuration limit. |
By usage restriction #
| Restriction | What it limits |
|---|---|
| Unlimited | Nothing. Use is unrestricted. |
| Count relevant | The number of tags stipulated in the agreement. |
| Countable objects | The number of objects named in the contract. |
| Rental | The number of operating hours, or days from first use, named in the contract. |
| Trial | A validity period, for which Siemens gives 14 days as an example, for tests and validation with no warranty. |
| Demo | Operating hours, or days from first use, in the same way as rental. |
Product lines add their own. SIMATIC PCS 7 uses a countable objects license that displays as X(Y): Y is the maximum licensed number of process objects, X is how many remain free, and the application subtracts whatever has been loaded into the automation system. WinCC in the TIA Portal adds a Power Pack, which moves you between editions, and an Unlock Copy License, which overrides copy protection with a customer-specific entry.
Two consequences for whoever owns the licenses.
- A floating pool and a count-relevant license fail in different ways. One runs out of seats. The other runs out of tags, and only the first looks like a licensing problem to the engineer who hits it.
- Rental and trial keys expire on a clock that no purchase-order spreadsheet shows you.
Which software vendors use ALM, and for which applications #
ALM is Siemens’ own licensing technology, so the products behind it are Siemens automation and process products. Siemens’ manuals are the reliable guide.
- SIMATIC STEP 7. The classic engineering tool. “Starting with STEP 7 V5.3, this key is installed with the Automation License Manager.”
- TIA Portal and its options. The current engineering framework, including STEP 7 Professional and the TIA Portal option packages. Siemens publishes ALM alongside TIA Portal releases, which is why version pairing (ALM V6.2 and its service packs against recent TIA Portal versions) causes so much activation trouble.
- WinCC (TIA Portal). The floating license is the standard license for the WinCC engineering system and works locally or over the network. Runtime and Runtime options use single licenses installed locally.
- SIMATIC PCS 7. The process control system. Its licensing manual says: “You can manage license keys centrally with the software Automation License Manager.”
- SIMOTION SCOUT. Motion control engineering: “The Automation License Manager program manages the licenses.” SCOUT moved from single-license authorization to floating licensing at version 4.0.
- SINEMA Server. Network monitoring: “To manage your SINEMA Server license, you use the Automation License Manager (ALM) program.” Licenses are sized by monitored device count (50, 100, 250 or 500), with an emergency license valid 14 days and a 21-day trial.
- powermanager and other SIMATIC add-ons, which Siemens ships dedicated ALM service-pack releases for.
One Siemens, two licensing stacks #
Not all Siemens software runs on ALM, and this catches out more license managers than anything else on this page.
Siemens Digital Industries Software products (NX, Teamcenter, Solid Edge, Simcenter, the EDA tools) run on the Siemens License Server, which is FlexNet Publisher underneath. Siemens’ installer documentation describes it installing “the Siemens Common Vendor Daemon, saltd, in place of the following license servers: Siemens (saltd), Siemens PLM (ugslmd), Siemens EDA (mgcld).”
One vendor, two separate stacks. If your estate covers both a design office and a plant floor, you’re running two licensing systems, with two sets of servers, two failure modes and two audit trails. A search for “Siemens license server” will often land you on the wrong one.
How Open iT supports your work with ALM #
Open iT is a software asset management vendor, operating since 1999, that measures how engineering and technical software gets used. Its flagship product, LicenseAnalyzer™, collects data from license managers and turns it into reporting: how many licenses ran at once, for how long, and how often someone was refused.
That reporting exists because the gap it measures is expensive. Across the engineering estates Open iT monitors, 20 to 40 percent of licenses are typically idle at any given moment: checked out, counted against your pool, and not being used by anyone. On a Siemens engineering seat, that’s real money sitting in a checkout that nobody can see.
ALM poses a specific collection problem. It writes no usage history log for another system to read, so a normal log-watcher has nothing to follow. Open iT collects it a different way.
You install an Open iT Core Client on the ALM license server. Every five minutes, a raw data collector requests the license usage history from ALM directly, hands it to a data collector, and passes the result through a preprocessor before it’s stored on the Open iT Core Server. ALM itself is unchanged, and nothing changes for the engineers checking out licenses.
From that data, Open iT produces four kinds of reporting for ALM:
- Concurrent usage. How many licenses ran at the same time, so peak demand becomes a number instead of an argument.
- Elapsed time. How long each session lasted. This is where you find the license opened at 08:00 and still held at 18:00 by someone who left at 11:00.
- Denials. When license requests were refused, how often, and the patterns behind them. That’s the evidence for buying more seats, and the evidence for not buying them.
- Real-time monitoring. A live view in the License Monitor Portal of what’s checked out now, next to every other license manager you run.
That last one is usually why ALM ends up in scope. If your estate also runs FlexNet, DSLS, RLM or a dongle-based manager, ALM isn’t really the problem. The problem is that the answer to “what do we actually use” sits in six unrelated places. Open iT natively supports 100+ license managers and applications at this level, so ALM data lands in the same reports as the rest.
Open iT’s Level 2 goes further. It measures True Active Usage on the workstation rather than the license server: keyboard, mouse, CPU and I/O activity, on Windows, Unix and macOS. Because it runs where the application runs, it works whatever license manager issued the key. Correlated with checkout data, it answers the question a renewal turns on. Not how many licenses were checked out, but how many a human was using.
Switching the collection on is a configuration job on the license server, run from the command line.
Frequently asked questions #
Where do I download the Automation License Manager?
From Siemens Industry Online Support, under the ALM entry (support entry 114358). Siemens publishes it free because licensed Siemens software can’t run without it. Avoid third-party download sites: an ALM version mismatched to your product version is the most common cause of activation failures.
Which ALM version do I need?
The one required by the newest Siemens product on that machine. ALM is backward compatible with older products, so install the newest version your estate calls for. A “no license found” error straight after a TIA Portal upgrade usually means ALM wasn’t upgraded with it.
What does it mean when the Automation License Manager service stops?
The licensing service isn’t running, so no product on that machine can find its key, including products whose keys are installed locally. It’s a service fault rather than a licensing fault, and it’s worth alerting on. On a license key server, one stopped service takes out every client depending on it.
Can I move a license from one machine to another?
Yes, that’s ALM’s main job. Transfer the key to the target machine, or to a USB stick and then to the target. For machines with no network connection, use the offline procedure with start, request and activation codes. The key has to leave the source machine. Copying it isn’t a transfer.
Does ALM tell me how many licenses we're actually using?
No. Its log records operations on license keys on that machine: a key used, transferred or checked out. It doesn’t aggregate usage across your estate, report concurrency, or show denial trends. That reporting has to come from a usage monitoring layer above ALM.
Is a floating license the same as a network license?
Siemens documents floating as a license type. While in some cases the terms are treated as identical, in Siemens’ case it’s important to note that their terminology is clear: they define this type of license as floating which can be delivered on a network.
See your own ALM usage data #
You know how many Siemens licenses you bought. The harder question is how many were in use last month, how many sat idle, and how many engineers waited while an unused key stayed checked out on a machine in another building.
Open iT answers that from your own ALM data, in your own environment, alongside every other license manager you run.
See a live ALM report → A 20-minute screen share with a licensing specialist. No install, nothing to prepare.
Sources #
- Siemens, SIMATIC Automation License Manager manual — license types, license key server and client, log view, key transfer.
- Siemens, SIMATIC PCS 7 Licenses and configuration limits function manual — central license key management with ALM, countable objects licensing.
- Siemens, SIMATIC Programming with STEP 7 manual — license key installation with ALM from STEP 7 V5.3.
- Siemens, SIMOTION SCOUT configuration manual — license management with ALM, move to floating licensing at V4.0.
- Siemens, SINEMA Server operating instructions — license management with ALM, device-count license tiers.
- Siemens, What information is available about licenses for WinCC (TIA Portal) — floating, single, Power Pack and Unlock Copy License.
- Siemens Digital Industries Software, License Server Installation Instructions — saltd common vendor daemon.
- Open iT online documentation, Automation License Manager (ALM), v10.2 — collection method, data types, configuration.
