Compliance Tab

FlexNet Manager Suite 2020 R1 (On-Premises)

Compliance is a measure of whether or not your use of the software is aligned with the terms of your software license, and in particular whether the total consumption is less than or equal to the licensed entitlements. This tab summarizes your position in three sections:

1. The Consumption details section consists of these three cards:

   • The Last updated card shows the time and the day (for example, today) or date of the last compliance calculation.

   • The Compliance status card shows the compliance status and risk reason (when applicable) for this license.
   • The third, untitled card shows appropriate totals (depending on license type) of all allocations, usage, raw consumption, peak consumption, raw installations, PUR savings, calculated consumption, overridden consumption, and maintenance from purchases.
2. The Entitlements and consumption section, where your purchased license entitlements are compared with the total Consumed entitlements. The entitlement and consumption details are represented through a simple arithmetic view. If you have extra entitlements available for use, the Available Entitlements result displays in a green bar; but if consumption exceeds available entitlements, the shortfall displays in a red bar.
   Note: This section does not appear for the Site (license type) and Enterprise (license type) licenses, and has a special format for IBM PVU licenses (discussed below).

3. The Entitlement limits section displays the entitlements limits rule that controls how the license is flagged if consumption exceeds purchased entitlements. A value of Unlimited or Subject to true-up means this license cannot be displayed as At risk. In addition, for a value of Subject to true-up, at the end of the true-up period, you must make purchases to retrospectively cover any over-consumption. Most licenses display As purchased, where a license is At risk if consumption exceeds purchased entitlements.

   This is an active control, rather than just a status report. For more details, see Entitlement Limits.

Consumption figures displayed here are based on the most recent compliance calculation on the latest imported inventory. By default, the overnight license reconciliation job imports the latest inventory and performs compliance calculations. The time and date of the compliance calculation is shown in the Last updated card, and at top right in the title bar for FlexNet Manager Suite. Unless otherwise marked, this time is adjusted to your local time zone. (Before the first compliance calculation on a new implementation, the card shows Consumption has not yet been calculated.)

Tip: Changes that you make in the web interface of FlexNet Manager Suite after the nightly reconciliation do not update the consumption figures shown on this Compliance tab. Therefore, if you have made edits, it is possible (and normal) for the total consumption figure here to be different than the total shown on the Consumption tab, which in some cases can reflect more recent changes. Values on the two tabs are synchronized after the next nightly reconciliation. Until then, reviewing the figures on the two tabs may help to show that your recent edits are having the intended effect.

Why is license compliance unknown?

Any license that is missing information required for compliance calculations is shown on this tab as having a Compliance status of Unknown (and in card view on license summary page as an Incomplete license). The most important reason for this is incomplete software inventory. For example, Microsoft Server Core and Microsoft Server Processor licenses require the number of threads, and cores or processors respectively, from hardware inventory. Some inventory tools do not include these details (for example, Microsoft SMS or SCCM prior to the 2012 release did not provide information on cores; and threads may be missing from various sources). Because license compliance cannot be accurately calculated without this information, it is given a status of Unknown (unless the license is already at risk). For more reasons on why license compliance is unknown, see Compliance Status.

The missing counts for core, processor, socket and thread can all potentially cause different license types to show unknown as the Compliance status. To identify the issues, a useful starting point is to check the Consumption tab for alerts showing problems with individual computers that are blocking consumption calculations.

Special results for IBM PVU licenses

For IBM PVU licenses, you may operate in two distinct ways:

1. You may use a connection to ILMT to import the results of points consumption calculations done by the IBM tool. This is the default mode of operation. In this mode, FlexNet Manager Suite also creates license records to match the licenses represented in ILMT. For each such license, when there are consumption points imported from ILMT, this Compliance tab shows the points consumed broken down into:
   • Peak from IMLT — the sum of region-based peak values for the reporting period, as calculated by IMLT.
   • Current from other sources — the latest results (as at the last reconciliation date, shown in the top right of the web interface) from all other sources reporting inventory related to this IBM PVU license. In general, these are expected to be full capacity points, since other sources are not usually approved by IBM for sub-capacity calculations; but if you have exceptional permissions, and in the Use rights & rules tab, under Rights on virtual machines and hosts, you have selected both Use sub-capacity license calculations where available and Allow sub-capacity licensing for sources other than approved IBM tools, this figure may include sub-capacity calculations for virtual machines. (It is best practice to document any such exceptional permissions by attaching audit-ready evidence to the Documents tab of these license properties.)
2. You may use FlexNet Manager Suite in "PVU mode", making it responsible for sub-capacity license calculations based on inventory gathered by FlexNet inventory agent. You choose this mode by setting the Enable frequent hardware scanning for IBM PVU license calculations check box (navigate to Discovery & Inventory > Settings and scroll down to the IBM PVU scanning section). Use this setting only when you have secured a license variation from IBM that authorizes use of FlexNet inventory agent as an inventory source in place of IBM tools (for more details, see the Sub-Capacity Licensing with IBM PVU chapter in the FlexNet Manager Suite System Reference, available through the title page of online help). In this mode only, the Compliance tab for IBM PVU licenses displays an additional Consumption by region section for sub-capacity licenses.
   Tip: A "sub-capacity license" means one where, for virtual machines (which typically are not using the full capacity of their host server), the calculation of PVU points is based on the properties of the virtual machine rather than of the host. An individual license can be set for either full capacity or sub-capacity calculations by your choice of radio buttons in the Rights on virtual machines and hosts section of the Use rights & rules tab of the license properties. If you choose:

   • Use sub-capacity license calculations where available, and you have also enabled frequent hardware scanning as required in your license variation received from IBM, the special Consumption by region section described below is displayed.
   • Always use full capacity license calculations, the special section is never displayed for this license, because that special section refers only to sub-capacity calculation results.

IBM divides the planet into three regions where consumption must be calculated separately (in order to prevent follow-the-sun migration of licenses). For each region, FlexNet Manager Suite in this mode displays two sets of values:

• Peak consumption value for each region, along with the UTC date/time when the peak consumption occurred (peak values are the ones used by IBM to determine license consumption and liability)
• Current consumption values, typically less than the peak, which are information-only to show how license consumption is varying since the peak.

To reduce clutter, you may separately close (or collapse) each of these sections within the Compliance tab.

In each case, as well as the results for the three regions, FlexNet Manager Suite also calculates consumption (peak and current) for inventory devices that have not yet been assigned to any region, but are reporting inventory from their locally-installed FlexNet inventory agent. Having a peak calculated for devices not yet correctly managed can indicate the scale of inaccuracy in the regional results, and you should assign these devices to regions as soon as possible. Once you do, at the next license compliance calculation, new peaks are calculated retroactively, as though the inventory devices had always been in their newly-assign regions, for the whole reporting period. Best practice is to keep Devices not assigned to any region at zero, so that all sub-capacity calculations fall into one of IBM's three regions.

Tip: Assignment to a region is a two-part process:

1. In preparation, some of your location enterprise groups must be assigned to the standard IBM-defined regions (navigate to Enterprise > Locations).
2. For each inventory device hosting PVU-licensed software, make sure to use the Ownership tab of the inventory device properties to assign each device to an appropriate location that maps into the correct region.

For a quick check of region assignments for a particular IBM PVU license, switch to the Consumption tab of the license properties, and display the IBM region and Location columns to see where each consuming device sits. (You can also filter to find the unassigned devices, as they have a blank value for the region.)

As well as the sub-capacity results, the peak values used by IBM for licensing costs take into account any devices (within each region) that are calculated at full capacity (normally, because you are not using either FlexNet inventory agent or IBM tools as the inventory source for these devices). For full capacity calculations from other inventory sources, history is not tracked. This consumption is always the result of the most recent import and compliance calculation, so that no dates/times are required here. In the most unusual case that you have approval for inventory sources other than IBM tools or FlexNet Manager Suite to be used for sub-capacity (rather than full capacity) licensing, best practice is to attach documentary evidence of your agreement to the Documents tab of this license. You can then select the check box for Allow sub-capacity licensing for sources other than ... (located in the section Rights on virtual machines and hosts on the Use rights & rules tab of these license properties). Naturally, when there are no full capacity results available, this Current full capacity from other data sources section is suppressed, and all the sub-capacity results from all sources are combined in the regional results above.

The total Peak consumption since date is the simple sum of all the values displayed in the Consumption by region section (historical peaks for sub-capacity, and any current full consumption, summed across regions). Provided that your values for Devices not assigned to any region remain at zero, this is your consumption of PVU points, and likely the figure for which IBM expects to charge your license fees (subject, of course, to any future increases in the contributing peak and full-consumption values).

Individual controls

Information and editing details for the individual controls/fields are in the topic listed below (in alphabetical order).

Note: The controls on this tab vary by license type. For a particular license type, you may find some of the controls listed below are not available on the Compliance tab.