Engineering License Management helps customers gain visibility into concurrent license usage...
... of various Engineering and industrial software such as Electronic design automation...
... Product lifecycle management, and Geographic information software from publishers like AutoCAD, ESRI and many others.
This helps to reduce software spend by maximizing efficient license usage...
... and minimizing business disruptions with more accurate usage visibility and forecasting.
This is enabled via an integration with OpenLM, a third-party tool available on the ServiceNow app store.
OpenLM integrates with a variety of license management servers in your environment...
... bringing that information into ServiceNow’s software asset management...
... which acts as a single system of record and action.
Let’s take a look.
A license management server maintains the pool of concurrent licenses...
... and manages the distribution of these licenses, based on availability.
Users submit a request to use the license and if there is an available license in the pool...
... they are provided a key to check-out the license.
When the user no longer needs access to the software...
... the license is checked back in, making that license key available again for other users to check-out.
The check-in of a license may occur based on certain pre-determined conditions, such as session length, or inactivity.
This is commonly done automatically and requires no action from the end user.
If a user requests a license, but there are no available check-outs available at the time of the request...
... they will be denied a license key and will not be able to use the software.
They will need to wait until other keys are checked back in, making them available for check-out from the pool.
Concurrent licenses come in different metric types.
Most commonly floating, network, and token.
Logging in to multiple License Management servers, to monitor license consumption and product usage data for each one, is burdensome.
When using ServiceNow with OpenLM...
... information is collected automatically from all the license management servers and fed directly into ServiceNow.
ServiceNow’s Software asset management normalizes the collected data...
... and reconciles it with the entitlement records.
Reports can then be created on product usage, license consumption, denials, total spend and optimization opportunities.
For this integration to work, you must download the OpenLM app, available in the ServiceNow app store.
The app will walk users through a list of guided steps to install and configure OpenLM to communicate with ServiceNow.
On the Engineering Apps Dashboard...
... you can see Current software spend, coming from reconciling your entitlement information with discovered products...
... and Potential savings, generated from opportunities to redistribute or remove un-used software licenses.
You can create rules that will automatically create reclamation candidates based on the license usage threshold that you set for software.
By creating a new rule...
... we can specify the percentage of the utilization of the software for it to be flagged for reclamation.
As an example, in the last month, if the software license utilization is less than sixty percent...
... it would mark it as a reclamation candidate with forty percent rights available to reclaim.
You can also select the specific product from the publisher that you would like to track.
Now, any licenses that are not being used to the requirements defined in the rules will be listed as reclamation candidates.
The accrued potential values of these candidates are what appears as potential savings on our dashboard.
Moving on, we also have views of the top used products...
... top active users...
... and the top idle users.
This shows the top denied products and users...
... to help avoid loss in productivity and potential monetary loss from delays caused by denial of access to software…
…and product usage by location to help visualize the usage of engineering software across geographies.
These views can also be filtered by Publisher…
…or Product.
As well as by date.
Clicking here reveals the License Usage Summary.
You can filter by selecting the License Metric type…
And the License Server.
The blue line reflects total quantity...
... green shows your license consumption...
... and red line represents denials happening for that license type.
License inventory gives you a list of all licenses that exist in your environment…
... along with information on which license management server is hosting those licenses...
... the quantity and when they expire…
… as well as the License Server Statistics...
... which provides you a consolidated list of alerts on license management servers and their connection status.
On the Denials Summary Tab, you can analyze denials in more detail such as, how they are trending over time…
... by date...
... by Users...
...or if it is only on a specific license management server.
With Engineering License Management...
... your customers gain visibility into engineering software license position and usage...
... helping to avoid audit risks and overspending...
... maximizing efficient license usage and more accurate usage forecasting.
For more information, see our product documentation, knowledge base, or podcast.
Or ask a question in the ServiceNow Community.