Collecting project information for usage using OpenLM Software

Preface

OpenLM Software allows organizations to collect usage data for billing and management purposes. OpenLM supports different policies, by groups or by project. Collecting information by groups is most common, the organization is using OpenLM in order to collect information according to any sub-division: subsidiaries, divisions, departments, etc.. The information is then used in order to implement the billing policy selected by the organization: charge by the hour, distribute maintenance costs between cost centers, or other.

Billing usage time by the active project is mainly used by project oriented companies. It helps such companies to calculate a more accurate cost of the project by collecting the usage time for each project.

Supported Software Systems

The process of collecting project information for software usage is supported for software systems that are using license managers such as FLEXlm (FLEXnet), SafeNet RMS, SafeNet HASP, IBM LUM, LMX and more.

These types of license managers are used by high-end software systems such us: ESRI ArcGIS, AutoDesk Autocad, Pro Engineer, PTC, Catia, Matlab and more.

Setting project support settings

OpenLM interfaces that allow the system administrator to perform the following actions:

• Create new projects.
• Set project state (Active, Not Active).
• Assign users to projects (or remove).

Version 1.5 of OpenLM provides these interface by using OpenLM Users Management Module. From version 1.6 and on, we integrated these interfaces into OpenLM EasyAdmin.

The project collecting capability needs to be activated from OpenLM Server Configuration form. This can be done by navigating to the Projects tab. The following options are available:
Activating projects capability (“Log Project Information”).
Minimal Usage Duration - User can set a short period of usage that won’t be considered as actual usage.
Agent’s Behavior - Allows the system administrator to select one of two policies, by using OpenLM Agent functionality or by Environment Variables. The use of OpenLM Agent functionality is more user friendly and provides a more accurate results.

Environment Variables - The use of an environment variable is simple, set the name of the environment variable and OpenLM will automatically collect the information based on the environment variable settings. Using these option may also require the use of “Add unknown projects”, OpenLM server will automatically create unknown project names reported by users.

OpenLM Agent functionality - OpenLM actively collects project information for usage sessions. OpenLM Agent provides the following functionality:

• Active Project prompt popps up automatically from OpenLM Agent when the user is activating the licensed software.
• Active project prompt to pop-up every few minutes, in case the user switched to another project.
• Active project prompt can be set to disappear automatically when the user ignores it.
• The user can also activate the active project prompt from OpenLM Agent icon at any time.

Generating Reports

OpenLM EasyAdmin->Reports Tab provides reports based on active project. The user can generate usage reports at any time and limit the query by almost any argument.

Individual sessions can be reported by using OpenLM EasyAdmin->License activity tab.

Synchronization with external systems and sharing information

OpenLM allows organization to synchronize project assignment information automatically with external systems like the organization project management system.

OpenLM supports the update of the project list and and assignment of users to project through OpenLM API.

External systems can also access the project information and totals by using OpenLM API.

Summary

OpenLM System provides a complete infrastructure that allows organizations to implement a billing policy for licensed software usage. The system supports billing policy based on groups or users, projects or both together.

OpenLM Supports automatic synchronization of project information with external system like project management systems.

New article about billing of license ...

New article about billing of license usage in arcticlebase.com. 

The article describes how to implement a charge back policy for licenses managed by a license server like: FLEXlm, FLEXnet, IBM LUM, Sentinel RMS, Sentinel HASP and more.

Floating license usage billing - how ...

Floating License Usage Billing - Its Implementation in OpenLM Version 1.5.5


The implementation of the usage billing policy in many organizations has proved to be a very profitable step. This article discusses the concept of FLEXlm billing and the usage of OpenLM Software in order to implement such a policy.

Many organizations use software systems that are licensed by Floating (concurrent) licenses. This type of license facilitates the organization to install an unlimited number of seats of the software. The number of licenses used concurrently are limited to a predefined number (i.e. set during the purchase). Many of the software systems licensed this way, use Flexera FLEXnet Publisher (commonly known as FLEXlm software). This type of licensing method is commonly used by software vendors that produce high-end software systems.

In many cases, such projects are initiated as a part of a License Server Consolidation project. In order to explain the project, let us use an imaginary company "Green Energy Ltd." from the USA that has 3 subsidiaries worldwide: UK, Australia, and Japan. Each subsidiary manages several license servers with different software systems. Let us assume the following software inventory:

Software	USA	UK	Australia	Japan
ESRI ArcGIS	55	34	46	21
Autodesk Autocad	56	26	15	21
PTC	24	24	12	31
Solidworks	35	11	36	41

The usage diagrams produced from OpenLM EasyAdmin show that utilization of some of the licenses is high, while other licenses are practically not in use, depending on the time and location.

This chart demonstrates usage of ESRI ArcGIS licenses in USA alone:

The first step the company took was to consolidate all the licenses so that a single license server will serve all users worldwide. This table shows the license availability worldwide after the consolidation:

Software	Total Licenses
ESRI ArcGIS	156
Autodesk Autocad	118
PTC	91
Solidworks	123

After the consolidation, the company checked the usage level of their licenses and found that the utilization is more balanced. But, some software systems are heavily used while others have a very low usage rate.

Thus, the licenses were better utilized when the company adopting the following two steps:

• Utilizing the consolidated license server now allows users to use the same licenses over the 24-hour period.
• The creation of a bigger pool of licenses provides a higher license availability.

Based on the usage reports, the company decided to purchase more licenses for some of the software systems, while cutting down the maintenance fee for other licenses that are under utilized.

The managers of some of the subsidiaries have complained that they pay for licenses they don't use; the reason for which is that the maintenance costs are evenly distributed between the subsidiaries. In order to solve the problem, the company decided to implement a billing policy based on the actual usage of licenses by each subsidiary. The "Groups and Projects" extension to OpenLM System provides this solution. The company has created a Group for each subsidiary using the OpenLM Users Management software.

In order to avoid the need to manually relate users to the Groups, the system manager decided to utilize OpenLM's ability to synchronize Active Directory users and groups with OpenLM Server database. Since the organizational belonging of each user is based on the structure of the organizational tree in AD, the manager chose the OU's option and set the system to constantly synchronize the information with AD. This way, each new user will automatically be related to the correct subsidiary. OpenLM automatically updates the user's belonging to a subsidiary, according to any change in the position.

Thus, the information now looks the same both in AD and in OpenLM Users Management interface.

After a month, the team was able to produce a usage report according to the different groups, thus easily producing a fair billing report for each group.

The UK subsidiary has decided to further enhance the accuracy of their project's pricing. By implementing a project usage policy, they have measured their license usage of each project. They have created all their projects using OpenLM Users Management application, and have assigned each user to one or more projects. Users that were assigned to only one project did not have to report the active project. Users that belonged to more than one project, report the active project using the capabilities of OpenLM Agent software.

The information collected this way allowed Green Energy UK to price their projects better, taking the cost of expensive software usage into account.

This example provided an insight to the basics of Floating License Billing that can be implemented by OpenLM system. We can see that the capabilities of OpenLM actually enabled the server consolidation project, and also provided all the information needed for billing.

The highlights of OpenLM functionalities demonstrated in this article are:

• OpenLM's ability to monitor the usage level of the organizational resources.
• OpenLM's ability to synchronize OpenLM information with Active Directory in order to avoid manual work and to ensure data accuracy.
• OpenLM's ability to easily provide usage information for different groups of users.
• OpenLM's ability to track the usage of licenses for specific projects.

Conclusion

OpenLM Software provides all the needed tools for the implementation of a usage billing system in organization using license managers like FLEXlm (FLEXnet). IT Managers are now able to easily implement a usage billing system that can lower operational cost while improving license availability and reducing administration costs.

We have to emphasize that this is not a real world example. In reality, there are many other problems that were not taken into consideration here, for example, network limitations and many other factors.

OpenLM for ESRI Desktop ArcGIS at YouTube

A new video for OpenLM for ESRI ArcGIS software was just published on YouTube. It demonstrates some of the capabilities of OpenLM Software for ESRI ArcGIS:

Management capabilities for FLEXlm licensed software using EasyAdmin.

Smart and automatic TIMEOUT functionality.

License availability notifications.

FLEXlm usage query by end users.

Synchronization with Active Directory.

More..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QCSWe5jcGM

Workstations tab in EasyAdmin2

Workstations tab in EasyAdmin2

OpenLM's workstation tab was completely updated in version 1.5.5 of OpenLM. This short article explains the new functionality.

Four new columns are introduced in the workstations panel: "IP Address", "User idle time", "Online" and "Controlled" that replaces the "Managed" column in earlier versions. These columns are added to "Hostname" and "Agent version". "Last Heart Bit" column has been removed.

A short description of each column:

Hostname shows the workstation's name as reported by FLEXlm or other supported license manager.

IP Address is collected when the system is set to resolve stations names (This is an optional setting at OpenLM Configuration form->Advanced).

Last User is the name of the username that was last active on this workstation. This value is only available when OpenLM Agent is distributed to end users workstations.

Agent Version column shows the version of the OpenLM Agent installed on this workstation. This information is very useful when distributing or updating agents on users workstations.

The User Idle Time column displays the number of seconds passed since the user was active on the workstation. This column will only display information when an agent is installed on the end user workstation.

The Online column has two possible values, online (green) or offline (gray). A workstation will always be offline if an agent is not installed on it. When an agent is installed, the workstation will be online when at least one user is logged in. It takes about five minutes before OpenLM switches a workstation's status from online to offline or vise verse.

The Controlled column is only relevant to supported systems, at this stage, OpenLM for ESRI ArcGIS. This column indicates if OpenLM Extension is properly installed on the ESRI Desktop ArcGIS software. When OpenLM Extension communicates successfully with OpenLM server through OpenLM Agent then the workstation is controlled.

The information provided by the updated workstation tab in EasyAdmin2 interface allows system administrators and managers to control license activity. For example:

• Recognize users that are idle and consume a floating license.
• Recognize unauthorized access to the floating licenses.
• Locate workstation that does not have OpenLM installed.
• Locate uncontrolled installations of ESRI ArcGIS Desktop software.
• Control the distribution of OpenLM Agent to end users workstations.
• Etc...

New Features in Version 1.5.4 of OpenLM

 New Features in Version 1.5.4 of OpenLM

This article describes the new features in version 1.5.4 of OpenLM.

General

More control over database upgrade - When upgrading OpenLM from previous versions it usually involves database upgrade. Until now the database upgrade program was a part of the installation program of the new version. Starting from version 1.5.4 the installation program is a separate program that the user can choose to activate as a part of the installation. The user can also choose upgrade later and execute the database upgrade program separately.

Support for Users Groups - OpenLM System now supports reporting by users groups. This is an extension to the system and it is licensed separately. The main interface of this feature is the new OpenLM User Management application. More interfaces can be found in OpenLM EasyAdmin.

Support for Projects - OpenLM now allows an organization to analyze usage time according to projects. This is an extension to the system and it is licensed separately. The main interface of this feature is the new OpenLM User Management application. More interfaces can be found in OpenLM EasyAdmin and OpenLM Agent (Will be explained in details later).


New modules

OpenLM Users Management

A system that allows system administrators to manage users groups and projects. The system was developed using Java so it can be installed on any operating system.
The system does not need to be installed where OpenLM server is installed, it can be installed on any workstation on the network. It communicates with OpenLM Server using HTTP protocol and allows easy and quick editing of users information. Although the system can be installed on multiple workstations more than one user can't update the system information at the same time.

The module supports the following actions:

• Create/Edit/Delete users, groups and projects.


• List/Query and manage users, groups and projects.


• Relate users to groups. One user may be related to zero, one or many group(s).


• Define default group to each user.


• Relate users to projects. One user may be related to zero, one or many project(s).


• Define default project to each user.

We are planning to add the ability to import/synchronize groups information from LDAP databases (Windows Active Directory).

OpenLM Alerts

A module that alerts system administrators on problems with their licensing systems. It checks conditions defined by system administrators and sends messages using email or SMS.

Since the module is monitoring the components of the licensing system including OpenLM Server and FLEXlm Servers we recommend to install it on another machine. The system is composed on two parts: the conditions editor and the alerter service.

The conditions editor allows system administrators to define conditions on one or more components like servers, vendor daemons, features. The first release of the system contains two types of conditions:

• Threshold conditions - Allows conditions like: If the usage rate of feature <feature_name> higher then <percent>.


• Duplicate License Usage - Will alert when one user is using the same feature on more then one workstation.
  

The module allows the user to define different severity levels to the defined conditions:
Notice
Warning
Alert

The module supports three types of destinations for sending messages to the end user:

1. EasyAdmin Alerts window on the "control panel" tab.


2. E-mail address.


3. Any phone by SMS.

The module allows the user to limit send times according to the hour on which the event occurred. This way the user can define that an email will be sent if the condition is met during work hour and later - an SMS will be sent.

OpenLM Alerts Service runs on a windows machine and checks the defined conditions. We recommend to consider these aspects when designing your alerts system installation:

1. OpenLM Alerts checks the alert with OpenLM Server that sometimes has to perform complex queries in order to generate the information. We recommend to define on needed alerts and the check frequency should be as low as possible.

This is the first release of OpenLM Alerts system. We are looking forward to hearing your feedback on it. Please send your feedback to sales@openlm.com.

Changed Modules

OpenLM Agent

OpenLM Agent is the end user tool of OpenLM System. All OpenLM customers are licensed to unlimited installations of OpenLM Agents on users workstations. OpenLM is an optional component but customers that use it report saving in administration time, satisfied user and better utilization of licenses.
We are constantly adding new applications to OpenLM Agent. In version 1.5.4 we added the ability to report active project in order to implement project billing system for FLEXlm licensed software. The software will allow the end user to set the active project from a simple and user-friendly form. The form can be opened manually from OpenLM Icon located on Windows notification are or pop up automatically when the user activates his licensed software.

The system administrator has total control over the behavior of OpenLM Agent. All options are available on OpenLM Server Configuration Form.

Updates to OpenLM EasyAdmin

The ability to choose export parameters - In previous versions, export option on OpenLM EasyAdmin tabs automatically created a file without the ability to choose the date format. In version 1.5.4 the user is able to select the exported file name, time format and timezone.

Total time was added to user activity tab - OpenLM EasyAdmin will accumulate and display the total usage time according to the user queries.

Reports tab was added and at version 1.5.4 it offers reports for projects and groups.

Updates to OpenLM Log Reader

Timezone configuration for FLEXlm servers - The configuration is now automatic and it does not rely on the FLEXlm server time settings.

What is new in version 1.5.4 of OpenLM

What is new in version 1.5.4 of OpenLM?

OpenLM Version 1.5.4 is a major release that adds important new features to OpenLM System and features overall under the hood improvement. The system is now faster, more accurate and reliable. The release also contains bug fixes for problems found in version 1.5.3.

Users Groups - License usage reporting according to users groups is now available. System managers can define different users groups and produce usage reports according to these groups. This functionality allows organization to accurately divide FLEXlm licensed software maintenance costs between departments, branches or subsidiaries.

Project reporting made easy - Many project oriented companies want to to know how many FLEXlm licensed software each project consumed. Until now the only way to do that was the use of the LM_PROJECT environment variable. OpenLM now allows a more convenient and accurate method based on OpenLM Agent. System managers can relate one or more projects to each user and the end user will be able to use OpenLM's Agents interface to set the active project. Advanced methods were implemented in order to assure accurate reporting.

FLEXlm billing - FLEXlm billing for User Groups or Project is now available in EasyAdmin.

Data export options - When exporting information from OpenLM the user can now control the export file name, timezone and time format.

More control over database upgrade - When upgrading OpenLM from
previous versions it usually involves database upgrade. Until now the
database upgrade program was part of the installation program of the
new version. From version 1.5.4 the installation program is a separate
program that the user can choose to activate and part of the
installation. The user can also choose upgrade later and execute the
database upgrade program separately.

Better control on the agent silent install - There are more command line parameters available.

Easier installation and configuration of OpenLM Log Reader - The process is easier due to a menu driver interface and automatic settings of FLEXlm server timezone.

More reports - New reports tab in EasyAdmin provides more reports to system managers.

The groups, projects and billing features are an optional features that require additional licensing. All other features are available with no additional charge for customers under valid maintenance contract.