Monitoring supporting programs with license restrictions

Available from 9.2.29.

Supporting programs are usually free of charge. However, in rare cases, a supporting program might be free of charge on condition that its metric utilization does not exceed a specific number of metric units. It can be a fixed number or the number of metric units that is used by the product whose part the supporting program is. When you assign a component (that represents the supporting program) to a product, you are not able to monitor metric utilization of the supporting program independently. Thus, you do not know whether it is still free of charge or should be paid for. To monitor metric utilization of a supporting program independently, create a dedicated product in License Metric Tool. Then, share the supporting program between the regular product and the dedicated product that you created. This way, the supporting program contributes to metric utilization of the product to which it belongs but you can also track its metric utilization separately.

1. Create a dedicated product to which you will assign the supporting program. For more information, see: Adding an IBM product to the software catalog.
   Tip: Name the product so that it can be easily determined that the product is not a licensable offering but is used only for monitoring usage of a supporting program with license restrictions. For example, DB2 Standard Edition for monitoring restricted usage for IBM InfoSphere DataStage.
2. Share instances of the supporting program between the regular product and the dedicated product that you created.
   1. In the top navigation bar, hover over Reports, and click Software Classification.
   2. Select the supporting program, hover over Assign, and click Choose from Catalog.
   3. Clear List products for which the component is listed as a bundling option.
   4. From the list, select the product that you created.
   5. Select Share component, and click Assign.
      
   6. Specify the relation between the component and the product as charged, and click Assign.
3. Recalculate the data.
   1. In the top navigation bar, hover over Reports, and click All Metrics.
   2. To refresh the data, click Recalculate.

Results

On the All Metrics report, you can view metric utilization of the supporting program. You can verify whether it fulfills license restrictions and is free of charge or exceeds the number of allowed metric units and should be paid for.