BMC Discovery Licensing entitlement
BMC Discovery appliances
There is no licensing limit on the number of BMC Discovery appliances you can use. It simply depends on the overall number of items discovered.
Licensing units of measurement
BMC Discovery is available with the purchase of the following line item from your ordering document:
| License | Unit of Measurement |
| BMC Discovery | per asset |
| BMC Discovery – Resource Unit | per resource unit |
'Per Asset' measurement
BMC Discovery does not use a license management system, but it provides a license management page that enables you to opt-in to cloud discovery, monitor your license usage for on-premises discovery and cloud discovery, and to see the status (whether or not it is installed, and if installed, which version) of storage discovery and the Extended Data Pack. For more information, see Managing-licenses.
Scanned hosts
Our core licensing model is simple: the customer pays an amount for a license to model up to a set number of unique server OSIs (Operating System Instances); effectively, this means hosts. Licensing is based on the lifetime of a Host averaged over the days in the month. The previous month's counts are considered according to the terms of your contract. A customer is entitled and licensed based on their agreement with BMC, and a licensing compliance team at BMC helps customers ensure that their BMC Discovery usage stays in line with their agreement.
If four scanners discover a host, it still uses just one license. The same applies to a consolidator that has pushed data from a scanner: the same host is found on both but still uses just one license.
BMC Discovery also collects data on network devices, printers, and other network-connected devices. Those do not count as a license.
BMC Discovery is not aimed at discovering desktop OSIs and does not discover and model them by default. You can discover desktop OSIs, but you must enable this on the appliance. Desktop OSIs do not count towards licensing totals.
'Per Resource Unit' measurement
With the "resource unit" unit of measurement, a subscription is required for the highest monthly average of Resource Units monitored, managed or discovered by the service. A Resource Unit (RU) is any type of physical data center asset or cloud computing service with the corresponding values determining the license capacity and subscription services consumed. The following details the list of supported RUs by asset type and their corresponding value: 1 RU = 20 container resources; 1 RU = 5 client devices (e.g., laptop, mobile device, or other hardware device permitting access to the Subscription Service(s)); 1 RU = 5 network devices; 1 RU = 5 PaaS resources; 1 RU = 1 Server; 1 RU = 5 storage ports; 1 RU = 5 telecommunication devices; 1 RU = 10 IoT devices, 1 RU = 1 undocumented asset. For example, if the desired License Capacity consists of 100 servers, 200 Kubernetes pods, and 50 network devices, the License Capacity would equate to 120 RUs.
Individual license entitlements
The following sections describe the individual licensing entitlements and indicate the licensing measurement units used for that entitlement.
BMC Helix CMDB license entitlement - 'Per Resource Unit' and 'Per Asset' measurements
BMC Discovery includes three named user licenses for BMC Helix CMDB administration only. The three licenses are provided for BMC Helix CMDB administration only, not as licenses to administer other AR System or BMC Helix ITSM applications.
Additional user licenses can be purchased through different BMC Helix products, please contact your sales representative if required.
The three named users provided with BMC Discovery are entitled to administer all functionality in BMC Helix CMDB. For example, they can:
- Configure data sources.
- Create normalization and reconciliation rules.
- Use Atrium Explorer for impact analysis, and so on.
- Define business services.
- Manage Service Catalog.
Sync for ServiceNow CMDB licensing - 'Per Resource Unit' and 'Per Asset' measurements
Sync for ServiceNow CMDB is a separately licensed add on. Sync for ServiceNow CMDB enables synchronization connections to ServiceNow CMDB, and provides downloadable mapping files.
Discovery for z/OS licensing - 'Per Resource Unit' and 'Per Asset' measurements
Discovery for z/OS is a separately licensed add on. When licensed, it provides details of z Systems running the z/OS operating system which feed into the BMC Discovery product. This includes information about the z System itself, the z/OS LPARs and the sub-systems running on the LPARs. For customers also running BMC MainView, BMC Discovery can also provide additional details about transactions and databases.
Discovery for z/OS is licensed based on the MIPS capacity of the z/OS environments being discovered.
Mainframe observed communications
From version 22.2, BMC Discovery supports the discovery and modeling of observed communication from mainframe computers.
Storage licensing - 'Per Asset' measurement only
Storage discovery is a license add-on for the 'Per Asset' license measurement only. It uses the same unit of measure as the base BMC Discovery licensed product and must have a matching one-to-one license count with the base license. BMC Discovery for Storage consists of regularly updated downloadable patterns like an extended data pack or TKU. For information about purchasing licenses for storage discovery, contact your BMC Account Manager.
Cloud discovery licensing - 'Per Asset' measurement only
Cloud discovery is a license add-on for the 'Per Asset' license measurement only. It is built into the core of BMC Discovery, so is a feature that you choose to enable. When you enable it, cloud licensing is charged for each managed asset–cloud resource on the following basis:
"A license is required for the highest monthly average of Cloud Resources monitored, managed (directly or indirectly), or discovered by the Product(s). A “Cloud Resource” is any instance of a cloud infrastructure that provides a service for other Cloud Resources, Computers or Users connected to it. For example, a Cloud Resource may include compute, network, storage or platform services that run in private or public clouds."
The following list shows examples of the type of service that will consume a cloud license. Not all are currently supported, though may be as cloud providers are added with future TKU releases:
- Application Hosting–for example, Azure Cloud Services, Azure Websites and Apps, Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, Google App Engine
- Containers as a Service–for example, Docker VM Extension, EC2 Container Service, Google Container Engine
- Scaling Options–for example, Azure Autoscale, AWS Auto Scaling, Google Autoscaler
- Database as a Service–for example, Azure SQL DB, AWS RDS, Google Cloud SQL, Azure DocumentDB, AWS Dynamo DB, Cloud Bigtable
- Analytics Options–for example, HDInsight, Elastic MapReduce, Google Cloud Dataproc
- Caching–for example, Azure Managed Cache, Amazon Elastic Cache
- Cloud hosts/VMs
See the Supported-Cloud-Providers pages for information on what is currently supported.
Cloud licensing FAQs
- Q – When a cloud host is discovered, does it count as a host or cloud resource?
- A – A VM in the cloud which is associated with a scanned host incurs a single cloud license. The scanned host does not incur a cloud license or a data center license.
- Q – When a cloud VM is discovered, but its host is not scanned, does it count a cloud resource?
- A – A virtual machine in the cloud incurs a single cloud license whether or not the host it runs on is scanned.
- Q – When an on-premises VM is discovered, does it count as a license?
- A – No, an on-premises VM does not count towards a cloud resource license
How can I tell what is consuming cloud licenses in real-time?
A cloud license is consumed for the following:
- A software instance (SI) node representing an item of software running in the cloud.
The following query shows software instance (SI) nodes that represent an item of software running in the cloud. These SIs each consume a cloud license. This query is used on the licensing page and the licensing reports that you can access from that page.
search SoftwareInstance where cloud
- A virtual machine (VM) node representing a discovered virtual machine running in the cloud
The following query shows VM nodes that represent a discovered virtual machine running in the cloud. These VM nodes each consume a cloud license. This query is used on the licensing page and the licensing reports that you can access from that page.
search VirtualMachine where cloud
How can I tell what is consuming host licenses in real-time?
Host licenses are only consumed for server OSIs. Host licenses are not consumed for virtual hosts running in the cloud, or for any physical host you discover that forms part of the cloud infrastructure. Host licenses are still not consumed for desktop hosts.
The following query shows host nodes that are not desktop hosts, and are not part of the cloud. The resulting host nodes each consume a host license. This query is used on the licensing page and the licensing reports that you can access from that page.