Managing your license entitlements

License Service collects and measures information about license usage of your IBM containerized software per cluster.

About this task

You can use a set of dedicated APIs to retrieve the following information:

  • Retrieving an audit snapshot for the cluster
  • Retrieving license usage of products on a cluster level and retrieving license usage of product deployed in user-defined groups (chargeback)
  • Retrieving license usage of bundled products on the cluster level
  • Retrieving information about License Service version
  • Retrieving information about License Service health

For more information about how to use the APIs to retrieve data and generate an audit snapshot, see Retrieving license usage data per cluster from License Service External link opens a new window or tab.

You can use the data that is collected by License Service from individual clusters to track the cumulative license usage in a multicluster environment. The cumulative report is not required for audit, but it might give you a full overview of your license usage in the multicluster environment. For more information, see Tracking license usage in a multicluster environment External link opens a new window or tab.

You can use the non-automated procedure to create a cumulative report for your environment. For more information, see Manually tracking license usage in multicluster environment External link opens a new window or tab.

Note: License Service has an extension for tracking license usage in multicluster environment called License Service Reporter that is only supported with License Service instance that is shipped with IBM Cloud Pak foundational services and integrated with IBM Cloud Pak solutions.
If you have an IBM Cloud Pak deployed in your environment and you deployed License Service Reporter, you can configure an OpenShift or non-OpenShift cluster to deliver licensing data from the License Service instance to License Service Reporter. For more information, about how to configure your Kubernetes cluster as License Service Reporter data source, see Configuring data sources External link opens a new window or tab.

For more information about License Service Reporter, see Tracking license usage in multicluster environment with License Service Reporter External link opens a new window or tab.