License Advisor

Learn how to monitor the license usage of the products that are included in the IBM Cloud Pak® solutions and IBM® stand-alone containerized software with License Advisor. Get familiar with License Advisor's architecture and data sources. Discover the IBM® tools that you can use to generate periodical license snapshots.

License Advisor aggregates the license usage data that is collected by License Service and IBM License Metric Tool, and presents the overview of your license usage on the dedicated dashboard. License Advisor gives you a unified experience for monitoring the license usage of your containerized software that is deployed in multicluster and hybrid environments.

Important: License Advisor is sunset and is not longer available with IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management. To track license usage of your IBM® containerized software, use License Service Reporter. For more information, see Monitoring license usage of IBM products.

Migrating from License Advisor to License Service Reporter

Starting from IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management version 2.3 Fix Pack 5, License Advisor is no longer available. All the capabilities of License Advisor can now be found in License Service Reporter.

The license usage data that was available in License Advisor comes from License Service that stores all historical data. To migrate to License Service Reporter and transfer the historical data, complete the following procedure.

Prerequisites

Steps

  1. Deploy License Service Reporter. For instructions, see Deploying License Service Reporter. It might take around 10 minutes for the License Service Reporter pod to start. Wait 15 minutes and go to the next step.

  2. (Optional) Clean the following leftovers of License Sender, which is a component of License Advisor, from each cluster that was configured to feed data to License Advisor:

    • the ibm-license-advisor-sender deployment
    • the ibm-license-advisor-sender-registry secret

  3. Configure each cluster that was configured to feed data to License Advisor as a data source for License Service Reporter. For instructions, see Configuring data sources for License Service Reporter.

    Note: For the cluster where you deployed License Service Reporter, the License Service instance is automatically configured. Thanks to that, you do not need to perform any configuration for this cluster and the license usage information are delivered to License Service Reporter.

  4. (Optional) If License Advisor shows data from more than last 30 days, synchronize the License Service historical data.

    Note: This step synchronizes the license usage data only. The user-defined thresholds are not synchronized and need to be manually set afterwards.

    Perform this step on each cluster with License Service that is configured as License Service Reporter data source.

    1. Define the synchronization start date to the time starting from which the License Service data should be sent to License Service Reporter. Provide the date in the following format: [year,month,day]. By default, the date is set to License Service first release date.

      START_SYNC_DATE=[2020,4,6]

    2. Define the namespace where License Service is deployed. By default, License Service is deployed in ibm-common-services namespace.

      LICENSING_NAMESPACE=ibm-common-services

    3. Apply the synchronization start date by running the following command:

      • OSX:
      kubectl get cm ibm-licensing-config -n ${LICENSING_NAMESPACE} -o jsonpath="{.binaryData.data}" | base64 -d | gzip -d | jq -c ".lastHubSynchronizationDate = ${START_SYNC_DATE}" | gzip | base64 | xargs -I {} kubectl patch cm ibm-licensing-config -n ${LICENSING_NAMESPACE} -p '{"binaryData":{"data":"{}"}}'
      • Linux:
      kubectl get cm ibm-licensing-config -n ${LICENSING_NAMESPACE} -o jsonpath="{.binaryData.data}" | base64 -d | gzip -d | jq -c ".lastHubSynchronizationDate = ${START_SYNC_DATE}" | gzip | base64 -w 0 | xargs -I {} kubectl patch cm ibm-licensing-config -n ${LICENSING_NAMESPACE} -p '{"binaryData":{"data":"{}"}}'

  5. Wait until your data is migrated to License Service Reporter. It takes from 12 to 24 hours to migrate the data from all the clusters and show the data on the License Service Reporter UI.

  6. Access the Licensing dashboard, the License Service Reporter UI. For more information, see Viewing license usage on the Licensing dashboard.

  7. Manually recover threshold values. For instructions, see Setting the license usage threshold