Licensing and metering

Your Operational Decision Manager product license gives you access to various components and features. After you install the components, you can monitor your usage for capacity or consumption, depending on your entitlement.

IBM container licenses

For more information about IBM container licenses, see IBM Container Licenses..

Reporting compliance for capacity entitlement

The IBM® License Service discovers the software that is installed in your infrastructure and generates reports. First, you deploy Operational Decision Manager to your Kubernetes cluster. Then, you deploy the License Service to that same cluster. Finally, you are ready to retrieve a report of the license usage.

For more information about the License Service, see Licensing.

In OpenShift

Install the IBM License Service operator by following Install on OCP.

After a couple of minutes, when the ibm-licensing-service-instance pod is running, retrieve the URL of the Licensing Service with the following command:

export LICENSING_URL=$(oc get routes -n ibm-common-services | grep ibm-licensing-service-instance | awk '{print $2}')
On other platforms

Follow the Installation section of the Manual installation without the Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM) documentation.

After a couple of minutes, you can retrieve the URL of the IBM License Service with the following command:

export LICENSING_URL=$(kubectl get ingress ibm-licensing-service-instance -n ibm-common-services | awk '{print $4}' | tail -1)
Retrieving license usage

To view the license usage, retrieve the License Service token and access the http://$LICENSING_URL/status?token=$TOKEN URL as follows:

export TOKEN=$(kubectl get secret ibm-licensing-token -o jsonpath={.data.token} -n ibm-common-services | base64 -d)

Or retrieve the licensing report file by running the following command:

curl -k https://$LICENSING_URL/snapshot?token=$TOKEN --output report.zip

Reporting compliance for consumption entitlement

The IBM License Metric Tool (ILMT) provides information about the use of decision artifacts and executed decisions. Users of subscription services can obtain information about billable artifacts. Your license covers consumption in the form of traffic between RuleApps and client applications.

The ILMT tool provides information on the following metrics:

Decisions
This metric shows the number of calls to a decision service in Decision Server for a specific time period. For example, if an application calls a decision service 10,000 times per hour in one day, the metric shows 240,000 calls for that day.
Artifacts

This metric shows the number of unique versioned artifacts in Decision Center. The artifacts are counted only once across all branches, releases, and activities. If you use duplicates of artifacts, the artifacts are counted separately. The metering service does not see the duplication.

Types of artifacts:

  • Business artifacts (BAL rules, decision tables, decision trees, technical rules, functions)
  • Decision operations
  • Deployment configurations
  • Ruleflows
  • Queries
  • Variable sets
  • Business object models (BOMs)
  • Vocabulary
  • Business-to-Exchange (B2X) artifacts
  • Resources
  • Simulation artifacts (metrics, key performance indicators, report formats, input data, and simulations)
  • Test suites
  • Business Action Language (BAL) templates

For more information about how to install the Operational Decision Manager consumption metering service, see IBM ODM Metering.