Tracking license usage in a multicluster environment

For better understanding of license usage in your environment, you can track the license usage of your products across multiple clusters. You can manually prepare a consolidated report, or deploy and configure License Service Reporter.

Audit readiness in a multicluster environment

License Service is an automatic solution that collects and measures the license usage of your software that is needed for audit. No manual post-processing is required.

In case of a multicluster environment, you only need to generate audit snapshots for each cluster for auditors to verify the overall license compliance. You do not need a consolidated snapshot for all your clusters.

Consolidating license usage data for tracking purposes

If you want to have better visibility of the license usage across multiple clusters, you can consolidate data on a single report. You can use one of the following tools for that purpose:

• Deploy and configure License Service Reporter, and monitor the usage on a dedicated dashboard. For more information, see Tracking license usage in multicluster environment with License Service Reporter.
• For smaller environments, or if you do not have resources for deploying and configuring License Service Reporter, you can manually prepare a consolidated report. For more information, see Manually tracking license usage in multicluster environment.

Determining the highest license usage for multiple clusters

The highest license usage in a multicluster environment is the highest daily sum of used metric units by a product on all clusters within the reporting period.

For IBM Cloud Paks®, the highest license usage is counted for the entire IBM Cloud Pak, not the individual bundled products.

The highest license usage across multiple clusters is automatically calculated by License Service Reporter and based on data delivered by your clusters, and displayed on a dashboard. You can also calculate it manually.

The logic behind determining the highest license usage for multiple clusters

First, the daily peaks from multiple clusters are collected.

Example: The following charts show the license usage of Product A that is licensed with Virtual Processor Core (VPC) metric and runs on Cluster 1 and Cluster 2.

Next, the daily peaks from clusters are added. The highest sum is the highest license usage in the environment in the reporting period.

Example: The following chart shows the sums of daily peaks for Product A that was registered for the period of 3 days on Cluster 1 and Cluster 2.