Enabling license awareness

You can enable license awareness.

Before you begin

You can set up license awareness to monitor you license usage and to verify that your systems do not exceed the number of licenses you have. You can notify virtual image owners when actual license usage reaches a specified percentage of your total license allocation.

You must be assigned the Cloud group administrator role or the Hardware administration with Manage hardware resources (Full permission) role to complete these steps.

About this task

You can use the console, the command line interface, or the REST API to complete this task. For the command line and REST API information, see the Related information section.

Procedure

  1. Click Reports > Product Licenses.
  2. In the License awareness section, select Notify virtual image owners when license usage reaches the thresholds set below.
  3. Expand IBM Software Catalog product licenses or Non-catalog product licenses to configure the license settings.
  4. Set the Enforcement fields for each product listed.
    The following values are available:
    Ignore
    No enforcement action is taken. Deployments continue unhindered, but license usage is still monitored.
    Warn
    An error is logged in the audit logs and a warning message is included in the virtual system instance history. Email notifications are sent to communicate the warning. Deployments continue unhindered, but license usage is still monitored.
    Enforce
    Any deployments of virtual system instances or virtual machines, and also any operations that cause exceeding the license limit, fail with placement errors. These cases include new and existing deployments, and also deployments that were previously saved and are now started. Email notifications are sent to communicate the unsuccessful deployment.
  5. For each product listed, set the number of licenses you possess in the Licenses owned field.
  6. For each product listed, set the Notify if usage reaches field.
    This field specifies the percentage of licenses that are used per licenses owned that triggers a notification to all users assigned the Create new catalog content permission. To ensure that notifications are sent, select the License Awareness check box and ensure that valid email information is set for your system.
  7. For products that are deployed, the number of deployed instances is displayed in the In the cloud now field.
    To add parts to these products, click Add part number.
  8. In the dialog box that is displayed, you can work with part numbers in the following way:
    • To add part numbers to products in batch, enter a part number in the corresponding box, select the check boxes for the VMs that you want the part number to be added to, and click Apply to selected VMs.
    • To specify if the license is to be tracked, select Enabled or Disabled in the Tracking column.
    • To add, modify, or delete part numbers individually, in the Part number actions column, click the corresponding icon for the action you want.

Results

Usage of your virtual systems dispensed by the system is displayed and exceeding your license threshold produces notifications.
Note: After you complete certain operations such as deploying, cloning, restarting, or deleting virtual systems in your environment, the license usage count might take up to five minutes to be updated.