Recording and tracking license usage


Record and track usage details of fixed and floating licenses by using AR System Current License Usage form and AR System Historical License Usage form. By default, AR System does not record data in these forms. You must turn on the Enable License Tracking option to record the data.

To get a report about license usage, see Generating-reports-to-track-license-usage. You can also get information about what type of license a user has by searching the user form.

To record data in the license usage forms

  1. In the AR System Administration Console, click System > General > Server Information.
  2. On the Configuration tab, select the required value from the License Tracking field.
  3. From the drop-down list, select Write Licenses or All Licenses Select Write Licenses or all Licenses from the drop-down, depending on your choice.
  4. Click Apply.
    AR System immediately starts recording data in the license usage forms. You do not need to restart the AR System server.

To stop recording data in the license usage forms

  1. In the AR System Administration Console, click System > General > Server Information.
  2. On the Configuration tab, select Disabled in the License Tracking field.
  3. Click Apply; then click Save.
    All data in the AR System Current License Usage form is lost when one of the following conditions occur:
    • The Disabled value is selected in the License Tracking field.
    • A standalone server is stopped.
    • All servers in a server group are stopped.

AR System Current License Usage form

The AR System Current License Usage form tracks all licenses in use on the server. The AR System Current License Usage form provides information about the currently logged in user. This form also shows license details such as floating or fixed type of license and the duration of a license on a particular system. 

Fields in AR System Current License Usage form

Field

Description

User Name

Name of the user who acquired the license.

Group ID

ID of the pool that the license belongs to (applies only to floating licenses).

Application Name

Application that the license applies to.

From the 18.05 release, the bundled licenses option is available for this field.

License Type

Type of license (fixed, floating, read, restricted-read).

AR System Current License Usage form tracks only fixed and floating licenses.

Server Name

Server to which the license is applied.

Time Acquired

Duration since the user acquired the license.

When AR System starts recording data in this form, it creates records for every license in use. Those records include the time that each license was acquired, not the time that the recording started. For example, if a user acquires license A at 10:15 A.M. and AR System starts recording data in this form at 10:30 A.M., the Time Acquired for license A is 10:15 A.M

Type of Record

Type of record used to track license usage:

  • Main—This record is used as follows:
    • For licenses not in server groups, this is the only record created to track usage.
    • For licenses in server groups, this is the parent record that tracks the total usage of a particular type of license.
  • Subrecord (server group only)—A child of a main record
    When a license is initially acquired in a server group, both a main record and a subrecord are created. If the user acquires another license of the same type on another server in the group without releasing the first license, the second license is recorded as another subrecord of the main record. The same is true for all additional licenses of that type acquired within the server group while the main record has at least one subrecord.

AR System Historical License Usage form

The AR System Historical License Usage form provides historical information about the licenses. This form also records the current license usage. This recording provides traceability of the current license consumption from this form and the data on this form will be in sync with the License Usage Report. Also, when the user logs out, the records on the AR System Historical License Usage form are updated with the release time of the license. The AR System Historical License Usage form is a single point of reference from where you can determine who is consuming user licenses; whether currently or over a certain period of time in the past. If a user releases a license while the License Tracking option is enabled, an entry is added to the AR System Historical License Usage form. The entry contains information about the usage of that license.

The following table lists the fields in the AR System Historical License Usage form:

Field

Description

User Name

Name of the user who acquired and released the license.

Group ID

ID of the pool that the license belongs to. Applies only to floating licenses.

Application Name

Application that the license is issued.

The bundled licenses option is available for this field.

License Type

Type of license (Fixed and Floating).

Time Acquired

Time that the user acquired the license.

Time Released

Time that the user released the license.

If the value of this field is NULL, the user is currently using the license. As soon as the user logs out, this field displays the time stamp of when the current license was released.

Total Use Time

The total amount of time in seconds that the license was in use.

AR System Licenses Audit form

You can view the license usage information, including the details of the licenses that are added, removed, or modified by adding a new AR System Licenses Audit form. To access this form, click Open Audit on the Add or Remove Licenses form.

Tracking server group license usage

When a user first acquires a particular type of license in a server group, the acquisition is recorded in the AR System Current License Usage form as a main record and a subrecord. For example, for a user currently logged into the system, there is one main record, and for every server in the server group the user is logged, there is one subrecord.

If the user acquires another license of the same type on another server in the group without releasing the first license, the second license is recorded as another subrecord of the main record. The same is true for all additional licenses of that type acquired while the main record has at least one subrecord.

When the user logs out of the sessions from a server by releasing one of the licenses, its subrecord for the license is deleted. When the last subrecord is deleted, it indicates that the user has logged out and released all the licenses from the server. The main record is also deleted and an entry for the entire session tracked by the main record is added to the AR System Historical License Usage form.

If you stop any server in the server group, all the subrecords for that server are removed when the server is restarted or when another server recognizes that the cleanup is needed for the server that is down. If all subrecords for a user are removed in this type of cleanup operation, the main record is also removed without any Historical License usage entry being created.

 

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