Viewing and tracking license usage
License Service collects and measures the license usage of your product at the cluster level. You can retrieve this data on request for monitoring and compliance. You can also retrieve an audit snapshot of the data that is audit evidence.
About License Service
License Service is required for monitoring and measuring license usage of the IBM Cloud Paks® and IBM® stand-alone containerized software in accord with the pricing rule for containerized environments. Manual license measurements are not allowed.
Software discovery
License Service captures product-related information from annotations set by IBM products. It captures information from the existing annotations of pods and stores this information for future auditing purposes. It does not create, alter, nor remove annotations set for and by other products. In case of doubts, questions, or problems related to annotations that belong to an IBM product (missing annotations, unexpected annotations), contact that product’s support team.
- Collects and measures usage of core and non-core metrics:
- Collects and measures the license usage of Virtual Processor Core (VPC) metric at the cluster level.
- Collects and measures the license usage of Virtual Processor Core (VPC) and Processor Value Unit (PVU) metrics at the cluster level of IBM® stand-alone containerized software that is deployed on a cluster and is enabled for reporting.
- Collects and measures the license usage of IBM Cloud Paks and their bundled products that are enabled for reporting and licensed with the Managed Virtual Server (MVS) license metric.
- Refreshes the data every 5 minutes. With this frequency, you can capture changes in a dynamic cloud environment. License Service stores the historical licensing data for the last 24 months. However, the frequency and the retention period might be subject to change in the future.
- Provides the API that you can use to retrieve the following items:
- Data that outlines the highest license usage on the cluster.
- An audit snapshot that lists the highest license usage values for the requested period for products that are deployed on a cluster.
- Supports hyperthreading on worker nodes also referred to as Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) or Hyperthreading (HT)
Deployment
To make sure that this service is successfully deployed, see: Validating License Service deployment.
Storage
- ibm-licensing-config
- ibm-licensing-annotations
- ibm-licensing-products
- ibm-licensing-products-vpc-hour
- ibm-licensing-cloudpaks
- ibm-licensing-products-groups
- ibm-licensing-cloudpaks-groups
- ibm-licensing-cloudpaks-metrics
- ibm-licensing-products-metrics
- ibm-licensing-products-metrics-groups
- ibm-licensing-cloudpaks-metrics-groups
- ibm-licensing-services
Using License Service for container licensing
After the automatic deployment, License Service collects and measures the license usage of the products that are deployed on the cluster. This data is required for compliance and audit purposes. With License Service, you can use the dedicated APIs to retrieve an audit snapshot for the cluster.
Core license metrics
Currently, supported core-based metrics for container licensing are Processor Value Unit (PVU) and Virtual Processor Core (VPC). For core license metrics, you are obliged to use License Service and periodically generate an audit snapshots to fulfill container licensing requirements. For more information, see Audit snapshot.
If your cluster has hyperthreading, also referred to as Simultaneous multithreading (SM) or Hyperthreading (HT), enabled, see Hyperthreading.
IBM Container Licensing does not specify any additional rules regarding namespace quota limits. The requirements and rules that are applied result from how Kubernetes operates:
- For each product, CPU limits of Pods are directly considered and capped at the capacity of the Worker Node(s).
- When the namespace quota is set on CPU limits, all new Pods that are deployed in the namespace must have Pod CPU limits specified.
- The total of Pod CPU limits must not exceed the namespace quota level.
- Namespace quotas are not applied to the Pods that were already running in the namespace before the quota was configured. They are applied to new Pods only.
For more information, see the Kubernetes documentation.
Non-core metrics
License Service additionally collects information about license usage of software that is enabled for reporting and licensed with other non-core metrics. You can use this data to track the license usage of these products, and determine your entitlement needs. For more information, see Reported metrics.
Viewing License Service status page
The status page is an html page that summarizes the most important information about your deployments on the cluster. The status page always shows the information that is collected and valid at the moment of page retrieval. For more information, see Obtaining a status page.
Viewing license usage on the Licensing dashboard
If you installed the License Service with the IBM Cloud Pak®, you can track your license usage on the Licensing dashboard. The Licensing dashboard is an intuitive report that shows details of the license usage on one or more clusters. For more information about the Licensing dashboard and the information it presents, see Viewing license usage on the Licensing dashboard.
To view the Licensing dashboard, you must first deploy License Service Reporter, and configure the data sources to fill the report with data. For more information, see Tracking license usage in multicluster environment with License Service Reporter.
You can also view your license usage through the dedicated APIs. For more information, see Retrieving license usage data.
Tracking license usage in multicluster environment
You can use the data that is collected by License Service from individual clusters to track the cumulative license usage in a multicluster environment. For detailed information, see Tracking license usage in a multicluster environment.
You can use License Service Reporter for that purpose. License Service Reporter is not obligatory. It is an extension of License Service that aggregates license usage data from multiple clusters and gives you clear view for the entire environment. License Service Reporter is deployed on one cluster and uses more resources for aggregation. To use this functionality, additional configuration is needed. For more information, see Tracking license usage in multicluster environment with License Service Reporter.
If you prefer to track license usage without deploying License Service Reporter, you can follow the non-automated procedure. For more information, see Manually tracking license usage in multicluster environment.
Troubleshooting
If you experience problems with License Service setup and performance or software discovery and reporting, see Troubleshooting License Service.