Chargeback

You can see how the internal organizations or business divisions in your company contribute to the overall license usage using the chargeback feature. This information might also help you monitor the namespaces during migrating your software to Cloud, or with establishing the potential chargeback. Chargeback groups are based on namespaces.

Chargeback - Filtering the license usage data by user-defined groups

For license compliance purposes, License Service automatically collects information about the highest license usage of your products in all namespaces in the entire cluster. However, for internal accounting, you might need to calculate the expenses associated with the license usage of the individual internal organizations or business divisions in your company, that is - chargeback. You can define groups and assign namespaces to these groups using this feature. Then, you can retrieve the license usage reports for the individual groups. As a result, you can analyze and understand the contribution of each group to the overall license usage, especially during the peak, or for any time range. You can also see which group has the highest and lowest usage, and what software is mostly used throughout your organization.

To filter the license usage by groups, divide your namespaces into groups by labeling them. You can assign multiple namespaces to one group. If you do not assign a namespace to any group, you do not track its contribution to the overall usage. Next, enable filtering feature in the IBMLicensing custom resource, and retrieve the license usage with the /products API with groupName parameter.

Enabling chargeback in License Service

To enable or configure the chargeback feature in License Service, see Enabling chargeback feature.