IT Asset Management Settings: Licensing Tab

IT Asset Management (Cloud)

The Licensing tab on the IT Asset Management Settings General page enables you to specify global settings for license visibility and reconciliation. The page has the following setting:

Licenses and license counts

This section enables you relax the default access rights that control which licenses and their associated counts (entitlements, installations, usage) are visible to operators. By default, operators with scoping restrictions can see only licenses that are owned by groups in their scope. This requires that you assign the ownership appropriately for every license that is to be visible to these operators with scoping restrictions, which might become an onerous task.

If you are not using access rights to control the activities of your IT Asset Management operators, you can ignore this setting.

Tip: Licenses that are not assigned to ownership by any enterprise groups are not visible to operators with data access restrictions.

Select any of the following values:

  • Licenses owned by their groups, with counts only for their groups — Select this option to restore the default behavior. You must assign the ownership of a license to an enterprise group that is in scope for the operator in order to make the license visible to the operator who has data access restrictions.
  • Licenses owned by their groups with enterprise-wide counts — Select this option to keep the restriction on license visibility, but allow operators to see counts reflecting the license compliance (entitlements, installations, usage) for the entire enterprise. This is a useful setting if you want to limit the view of licenses but expect operators to make group assignments or individual allocations with insight into the global impacts of their decisions.
  • All licenses, with counts only for their groups — Select this option when you are not trying to hide the names of software licenses, but want the operators with restricted scope to focus on compliance figures only for their specified areas of responsibility. When you choose this option, you no longer need to assign the ownership of a license for it to be visible to operators with scoping restrictions.
    Tip: There is no option to allow an override view of all licenses and all counts. To achieve this full visibility, remove the access restrictions for your operators.

Reconcile

Select the Include expired licenses in reconciliation check box to include licenses that have reach their Expiry date in the license reconciliation (or license consumption calculation) process. For subscription (or other time-limited) licenses, the Expiry date is the date when the current license expires, however expired licenses may still be in use or valid which means you may want to include them in the license reconciliation process.

Clear the Include expired licenses in reconciliation check box to exclude licenses that have reached their Expiry date from the license reconciliation process.

Note: Licenses with a Status value of Retired are always excluded from the reconciliation process regardless of the option selected here.

IBM reporting and archiving settings

This section is visible only when you have licensed FlexNet Manager for Datacenters, and only when IT Asset Management is in 'sub-capacity mode', responsible for sub-capacity calculations of PVU points consumption and VPC counts (see IBM High-Frequency Scanning).
Tip: This one setting controls the use of IT Asset Management for all IBM sub-capacity licensing calculations, including both IBM PVU points calculations, and Virtual Processor Cores (VPC) calculations for licensing Cloud Paks.
The section allows detailed management of both reporting and data retention periods for reporting license consumption to IBM.
Tip: The reporting date that you set here controls results shown in the Management views in IT Asset Management, and also sets the default start date offered for the IBM PVU License Consumption and the IBM VPC License Consumption reports. Of course, each time you wish to run either of those reports, you can customize the reporting dates without needing to make any changes on this page.

Because the sub-capacity license consumption must be calculated independently for each of three IBM regions that together cover the entire planet, dates specified in this section are taken to be from midnight in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). All regional consumption details are worked out in UTC for synchronicity.

The first choice, between manual and automated period roll-over, determines what additional controls are displayed:
  • To manually manage roll-overs of your reporting period, select Manually set the calculation period start date. A date selector appears, where you can either type in or select your preferred start date. If you make this choice, best practice is that you return to this page and manually start the next reporting period when it falls due.
  • To save the management work of resetting the date for each reporting period, select Automatically adjust the calculation period start date. An additional line of controls appears where you can set both the reporting period (typically either 1 month or 3 months, in normal IBM requirements), and the start date for the current reporting period.
    Tip: Although this date picker defaults to today's date, you can freely select any date, including those within the past reporting period. This control can be set independently of the date when you started using IT Asset Management for sub-capacity points calculations (see next control for more details).

Naturally, the peak consumption values are reset for each new reporting period. For example, if your new reporting period starts January 1, then after that night's full reconciliation, each IBM region shows a peak value occurring on January 1, and those values may be unrelated to the peak values for the previous period. Keep in mind that the peak date is the last date when the peak value applied; so in a steady-state environment, the peak date advances, always showing yesterday's date (by default; or more accurately, the date of your last license reconciliation). Only as the reporting period rolls on, and any input changes take effect, might consumption decline, finally leaving the peak date stable.

Because each full reconciliation also recalculates the sub-capacity consumption figures for the entire data retention period, any adjustments you need to make to the roll-over dates are taken into account at that time. For example, suppose that one IBM region had a peak value on January 2. Yesterday your reporting period was set to start on January 3, so that peak occurred in the previous reporting period. But today you corrected the reporting period to start on January 1; and after the next full reconciliation, the January 2 peak now occurs in the current period.

Ignore any value prior to: allows you to specify a switch-over date to change from reporting using ILMT to reporting using IT Asset Management, even when that switch-over occurs in the middle of an IBM reporting period. For example, suppose your reporting period runs for 3 months from January 1. On February 15, you commence production use of IT Asset Management as your sub-capacity calculator. Enter that switch-over date here. On switch-over day, prepare and archive a report from ILMT covering the period to date (January 1 to February 14). From February 15 onwards, IT Asset Management records all relevant data, and once April starts, you can prepare and archive the appropriate report (such as IBM Cloud Pak License Consumption or IBM PVU License Consumption) for the part-period February 15 to March 31. Submitting this report together with the ILMT report for the first half of the period gives complete coverage, with a clean junction at the change-over date.

Keep historical data for: lets you manage your data retention period (and therefore the database space needed for historical data for related license types). While IBM normally requires data retention for two years, that figure relates to archiving the output reports for that period. In contrast, this setting is for raw input data. Each time that a full compliance calculation is run (typically, overnight), sub-capacity consumption is recalculated (using the latest available raw data) for the entire data retention period.

If you are using the default 3 month reporting period, the default of keeping historical data for 180 days (6 months) always allows for data updates (and new reports) for the current period and the previous one — that is, you can safely run the report for the previous period during this current period; but you should archive that final, previous report before the end of this current period. (Alternatively, choose your own setting that satisfies your policies for data retention and fits within your database sizing practices. You can expect about 5GB of historical data stored in a 6-month period in an estate of around 10,000 devices.) Note that this is a rolling window, so that each full compliance calculation also includes cleaning up the old data that now falls outside the data retention period.

Tip: The Obsolete inventory system setting (accessible by way of Administration > IT Asset Management Settings > General > Inventory tab), and the Keep historical data for setting both operate independently of each other. The Obsolete inventory system setting governs deleting inventory devices, while the Keep historical data for setting is applicable to the IBM retention period and governs archived IBM devices. Note that if a device containing IBM software is deleted using the obsolete inventory setting, then subsequently that device will become archived and be retained until the end of the IBM retention period. For example, if you delete a device subject to IBM PVU licensing in place, and the retention period is set to 180 days, said device would not be removed from an archived status until after 180 days.
Tip: The IBM Cloud Pak License Consumption and IBM PVU License Consumption reports can only include data from the beginning of the data retention period.
When you are satisfied with all the settings on this tab, click Save (bottom right corner).

IT Asset Management (Cloud)

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