What is Vector Dongle Licensing? #
Vector Dongle Licensing uses a portable USB device that contains protected copy of the software license for specific Vector software applications, which provide solutions for automotive electronics including Automotive Open System Architecture (AUTOSAR), autonomous driving, specialized internal communication network in automobiles, diagnostics standards, safety and security, and e-mobility.
Vector dongles offer secure and protected software licensing that is easily portable. The application is activated by simply plugging the Vector dongle to the USB port of a computer. The license cannot be shared with other users in the network, but it can be used by any user on the computer or on another computer by simply plugging in the specific dongle. However, the application will be deactivated if the dongle is unplugged from the computer.
Vector Dongle Monitoring and Management #
There are two types of Vector dongles: the Vector USB Dongle and the Vector Keyman. The Vector USB Dongle is bigger and only supports Vector’s Legacy License Model (LLM). On the other hand, the Vector Keyman is a lot smaller, supports the New Vector License Model (NVLM), and is backwards compatible with LLM through the Migrate procedure in the Vector License Client tool.
Vector dongles only work on local installations, but there are utilities installed together with the dongle that could provide license information. However, for a more comprehensive license usage report, you would need a more powerful tool that is capable of polling and aggregating data from all dongles connected to all the machines in the network.
How Open iT Supports Vector Dongle #
Open iT LicenseAnalyzer uses polling to get license usage data from each installed dongle. To capture the license usages of the dongle, Open iT data collector is installed on the machines wherein the Vector dongles are plugged. These data collectors are designed to fetch data from the C-based API of the dongle, which is responsible for providing license inventory of all the connected dongles. Specific poll parsers convert the collected raw dongle data to Open iT format for report generation.
Through the collected data, various essential reports can be created. The following are the data produced and can be reported through Open iT LicenseAnalyzer Vector Dongle reporting:
- 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 version
- User: username of the license user
- Available licenses
- Duration: total amount of time of license usage
- Average licenses in use
- Maximum licenses in use
- Average Utilization
- Maximum Utilization
- Elapsed Time: combined time of license usage
