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  • 1.  Maximo License Utilization

    Posted 08-08-2020 08:23
    Dear Experts,

      How can we calculate Maximo Concurrent user license utilization ? Does current count from login tracking table give the correct value ?

    Thanks
    Alok
    #Administration

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    Alok Pattnaik
    Praxis Solutions
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  • 2.  RE: Maximo License Utilization

    Posted 08-09-2020 01:59
    Hi Alok,

    We used Login tracking table data to find concurrent Users( one of my team mate did an awesome job in creating an SQL query to visualize this data). It is achievable task but you have to be really good to create an sql script which brings such data out of Maximo DB without killing the DB. If you are trying to do this then I would suggest doing it in a non-prod db by using the PROD DB dump.
    Other option is using Maixmo system out logs, Maximo System out logs periodically prints the number of concurrent users and that is very exact information. Again , one of my Team mate wrote a VB script which traversed through System.out log files and found this information for the period of data available from logs. We had a mechanism to store system.out logs of the last 1 month in a folder and the VB script was able to tell the concurrent users for each day in the last 1 month.
    Biggest difference in the above 2 methodologies is that Login tracking can give you details about what type of license that is getting used by concurrent users. 

    One more option is to use Maximo's new License monitoring application. I tried using the application but it didn't give me good results. May be I was not able to provide the correct parameters for it. Still the data provided were so incorrect I do not trust that application.

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    Biplab Choudhury
    Tata Consultancy Services
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  • 3.  RE: Maximo License Utilization

    Posted 08-09-2020 12:46
    As Biplap mentions, you need to use login tracking data but the currentcount attribute itself is worthless when it comes to licensing. For one, there are multiple types of licenses (Authorized, Express, and/or Anywhere, plus all the industry solutions/add-ons on top of that) which you can't determine just from the number of users. So you need to know what license someone needs before determining how many of those you had logged in during a given time.

    In addition, IBM licensing is based on the most concurrent users logged in during a minute window over a 24 hour period. That means if user a logs out at 10:00:01 and user two logs in at 10:00:55, both users have to be counted in the number of users during that 1 minute window. If that 1 minute window was the largest over the 24 hour period, then that means you would need 1 more license than currentcount would possibly report. And that's assuming you trust the accuracy of currentcount, which I wouldn't. It's OK to get a high level idea of how many users are in a system for making decisions related to system load, but not something I would depend on for licensing. 

    It's pretty complex to analyze these minute windows to determine how many of a given type are logged in and I can't share what we have utilized unfortunately. Similar to Biplap, my experiences with License Usage Monitor haven't been great but I haven't tested it thoroughly on 7.6.1.1/7.6.1.2, and they address many bugs in each release. It's also worth noting, that when it comes to an audit, what the IBM tooling states is not used to validate compliance. IBM utilizes third party auditors (like all audits have to be to ensure independent review) that determine the license counts utilizing their own calculations. You can potentially try and dispute flaws in their calculation, and the auditors can ask IBM questions, but being in compliance in License Usage Monitor (or any third party tooling for that matter) isn't a guarantee that you'd be found in compliance in an audit.

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    Steven Shull
    Projetech
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  • 4.  RE: Maximo License Utilization

    Posted 08-09-2020 13:17
    Thank you so much Steven for the detail explanation. Initially I thought currentcout would be my measure of concurrent users count, but when we checked the code for how it is being calculated and found that it is getting updated every 15 minutes. So no use for the audit.
    So now I am currently working on custom query on logintracking data.

    Thanks 
    Alok

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    Alok Pattnaik
    Praxis Solutions
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