Overview of Rational License Key Server Administration and Reporting Tool
Introducing IBM Common Licensing
The IBM Common Licensing provides a service to host licenses and serve tokens for IBM Rational® applications. Much activity is going in the IBM Common Licensing, and some of those activities involve d(a)emons and wizards. The IBM Common Licensing is at the core of IBM Common Licensing. For the Rational Jazz™ client applications, the Jazz Team Server manages the authorized and floating licenses. If you use tokens for your Jazz applications, you also need the IBM Common Licensing for the token service. A token service authenticates an entity and issues a security token.
Getting started with Rational License Key Server Administration and Reporting Tool
- Concurrent peak usage
- Concurrent peak denial
- License usage per user
- License availability
- License expiration
- Token distribution
- Chargeback
- An administration user interface for both Windows and UNIX platforms
- Viewing and monitoring capability of all licenses that are served by the IBM Common Licensing and the Jazz Team Server
- Reporting status monitoring
- LDAP integration for user management
You use this tool to generate reports on license usage from your license servers: the IBM Common Licensing, the Jazz Team Server, or both. You can also use the reporting tool to remotely administer your license servers. Being able to remotely administer your license servers is helpful in distributed environments where you might want to administer one or more license servers from a single remote location. Administration involves starting and stopping the license servers and importing license files to the servers.
The reporting tool uses the Rational License Key Server Administration Agent to communicate with the IBM Common Licensing and the Jazz Team Server. The agent works like a behind-the-scenes operation that connects the entities that you see and work on: the license server and the reporting tool.
This diagram illustrates how these different components are laid out in a typical installation topology.
This topology assumes that you use more than one IBM Common Licensing. Also, the topology shows how licenses are deployed on the Jazz Team Server. You must install the Server Administration Agent on all the license server machines that you want to enable for remote administration and reporting. The Server Administration and Reporting Tool, which is installed separately, communicates via the Server Administration Agent with the license servers.
The Jazz Team Server works in the context of authorized licenses, floating licenses, and token licenses. If you use applications that run on the IBM Jazz platform, you can use the Jazz Team Server to deploy and manage your licenses. The Jazz Team Server also functions as a license server, and you can import your Jazz license files (client access licenses or CALs) to the Jazz license server. For tokens, however, the Jazz license server is required to connect to a IBM Common Licensing instance for the token service. When a Jazz user requests tokens, the Jazz License Server forwards the token request to the IBM Common Licensing for token check out. You do not need the IBM Common Licensing if you are using authorized or floating licenses on the Jazz license server. The following table illustrates this concept more clearly.
| License type | Rational License Key Server | Jazz Team Server – license server |
|---|---|---|
| Authorized | ✓ | ✓ |
| Floating | ✓ | ✓ |
| Token | ✓ | X (Requires IBM Common Licensing for token service) |
The Rational License Key Server Administration and Reporting Tool provides reports on all license types on both the IBM Common Licensing and the Jazz license server. For Jazz application tokens, the Rational License Key Server Administration and Reporting Tool extracts the report data from the IBM Common Licensing.
For a list of Rational product families that are supported by Rational License Key Server Administration and Reporting Tool, see technical document http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21699136.