What does the Maximo License Usage Monitor Application do?
In previous versions of Maximo, it was near impossible to track licensing usage without performing a complicated audit of user rights and tracking Maximo user sessions. Fortunately, these days are long behind us with the addition of a new Administrative application that is now being included in recent versions of Maximo.
The License Usage Monitor Application was first released with version 7.6.0.5 (June 2016). Since it’s initial release there have been a few updates to the application which is now more user-friendly and intuitive than the original version. In this post, we will cover typical usage of the application and common pitfalls and ways to ensure the application is working for you.
The purpose of the License Usage Monitor Application is to allow organizations a means to track license usage of all in your Maximo system to ensure that your usage remains in compliance with your licensing agreement. With this information, you can determine if your licensing mix is right for you, and see if you are over licensed, under licensed or if your licensing mix makes sense for your company.
How to use the License Usage Monitor Application
Let’s get started on how to use the application. To Navigate to the application from the Go To menu, you’re going to have to click into the ‘Administration’ module and click on the ‘License Usage Monitor’ application.
Creating License Records
When getting started, the best approach is to create a new license for each type of license that your organization has rights to in your license mix. For example, if you have a blend of Authorized, Limited, Express, Self-Service and Concurrent licenses, you would create 5 license records (one for each license type).
Figure 1 – License Usage Monitor Application – License Types
It’s important to know that each license record will only consider a specific product only. If you happen to be only using base services Maximo then your only option is IBM Maximo Asset Management. However, if your company has implemented industry solutions, you will have to create licenses for every combination of license type and product entitlement that your organization is tracking.
Figure 2 – License Details
When creating a new license record you must first enter a Purchase Detail Record which requires at the very minimum a Quantity (indicating the number of licenses that have been purchased). You may also enter other purchasing details, such as the person who purchased the licenses, the person responsible (responsible for tracking licenses going forward) and the vendor (which does not necessarily need to be a company record in Maximo).
To view which applications each license type has access to, you can click the ‘Applications Access List’ action from the More Actions menu which will open a dialogue box. For each application in Maximo that exists under the product name specified on your license, it is clearly shown what type of access is allowed for each application whether it be FULL ACCESS, READSAVE, READONLY or NOACCESS.
Figure 3 – Application Access List
For those of you that are confused by the READSAVE access as I was, I will offer my best explanation. This functionality acts exactly as you would expect if a user has access to only the READ and SAVE signature options for an application they will fit into this license model. However, I was finding that users with full access (READ, SAVE, NEW and DELETE) were still being considered LIMITED users. The reason that this was happening was due to the checkbox “Available for Limited License” being checked. This checkbox when checked gives limited users FULL access to these apps listed for a limited license. In the image shown, the middle record would enforce READSAVE access for express and limited licenses however the top and bottom rows would allow limited users full access while express would be limited to READSAVE.
Figure 4 – Limited License Check
A very common issue I’ve found when setting up a license record is finding the “Licenses deployed” field shows 0. This happens even when I know that users should exist for this specific license type. The cause could be either that users do not have access to IBM
Maximo Asset Management or that users have access to other applications which are not part of IBM Maximo Asset Management. You can find out what applications or access users have that exists outside of the license configuration with the query below (taken from the IBM technote found here https://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21995723&acss=danl_4140_web)
select unique app from applicationauth where (optionname='READ' or optionname='SAVE' or optionname='DELETE' or optionname='INSERT')
and groupname in (select groupuser.groupname from groupuser where userid='<*TYPE USERS ID HERE*>' ) and (groupname not in (select varvalue from maxvars where varname='ALLUSERGROUP')
or app not in ('PLUSCTMPLT','PLUSTCLAIM','PLUSTCNTMP','PLUSTCOMP','PLUSTCONST','PLUSTCOUNT','PLUSTDTIMP','PLUSTINSP','PLUSTLOGS','PLUSTPOS','PLUSTRS','PLUSTSTKRG','PLUSTTLMCD','PLUSTTMPLT','PLUSTVEND','PLUSTVS','CHANGEPSWD','CONTSFW','RPTOUTPUT','SFWLICVIEW','STARTCNTR','TLOAMSWCTG','PLUSPRESP'))
and not exists (select 1 from maxlicapps where licensenum='<*TYPE LICENSE NUM HERE*>' and maxlicapps.appname= applicationauth.app);
After determining any of the exceptions you may modify the application access of a license to accommodate for the exceptions. Common exceptions are likely any cloned applications that the Maximo license record hasn’t been made aware of.
To configure the system to automatically calculate license user counts, a Data Collection process must be configured. This process must be scheduled in the Data Collection Settings dialogue. When the process runs, Maximo considers all the users that logged in over the previous day and determines based on the user access which license type they are a member of. After doing this for all logged in users we will see the license counts for each license add up which can then be compared to the licenses owned. This allows you to view in one application if your organization is within compliance of your licencing agreement.
Figure 5 – Data Collection Settings
Tracking Concurrent Licenses
Finally, concurrent licenses can be tracked as well. For those of you who aren’t aware, concurrent licenses grant users the same access as authorized users but the license can be shared by multiple users (that aren’t logged in at the same time). If you have a group of 20 users with authorized access but for example, only 3 are ever logged in at one time, you might be better served by buying 3 concurrent licenses instead of 20 authorized. The way the license tracking application tracks this is day by day, it will consider the user login session history for all users with Authorized access and will count the users with the most time logged in as Authorized (up to the amount of license you own). Next, it will take the remaining users that aren’t counted as authorized and it will determine the peak amount of login sessions (i.e. what is the most amount of these users logged in at one time). The peak number will determine how many concurrent licenses are being used.
