New report for IBM licensing in Kubernetes clusters

The report applies only to Kubernetes clusters. Because it merely extracts and displays data from the IBM License Service, it is completely independent of inventory collection and license consumption calculations within IT Asset Management. This has two significant impacts:

• The consumption shown in this report is not included in any other listings or reports within IT Asset Management. For example, consumption listed in this IBM Kubernetes-only report is not included in the existing IBM Cloud Pak License Consumption report (which is a FlexNet report that excludes Kubernetes clusters), and vice versa.
• This separation also means that, if you have software included in this report that you have also separately licensed elsewhere (not in a Kubernetes environment), the Compliance status of those other licenses within IT Asset Management no longer reflects your total exposure. You need to combine the consumption reported by the IBM License Service (shown in this report) with the consumption recorded for your other license(s) for the same product, and compare the resulting sum to the entitlements purchased.

One helpful aspect of this report is its widespread coverage. For example:

• The report includes both individual standalone products that are not software bundles, as well as bundles like IBM Cloud Paks.
• For software bundles, the report shows how the IBM License Service breaks down the consumption results across the individual member (bundled) products that are within the IBM Cloud Pak. You can see the contribution that each bundled product makes to the overall consumption of the software bundle.
• The report also covers all known Kubernetes clusters within your estate (including those you are hosting in cloud service provider networks), identifying the differing points consumption within different clusters.

So a software bundle may result in several rows in the report, covering each bundled (member) product across each Kubernetes cluster, so that you can see every contributing component. Helpfully, IT Asset Management tracks all those contributions, and for each product bundle shows the peak value (maximum sum) for all those bundled products across all those Kubernetes clusters, as well as the date within your chosen reporting period when that peak value first occurred. These two values, the first peak date and the peak sum, are repeated in every line for a software bundle, so you can always compare the total with any contributing element in the same row. The peak sum is your licensable consumption that the IBM License Service reports for your chosen reporting period. You may select any reporting period within the last 180 days leading up to your latest nightly compliance calculation, as older data is cleaned up after that fixed period.