Monitoring license usage using IBM Spectrum LSF License Scheduler

IBM Spectrum LSF License Scheduler allows for an efficient use of licenses in a cluster. It has four main benefits: sharing of licenses easily, ensuring appropriate license allocation, improving service levels and productivity, and reducing or avoiding costs. License Scheduler manages license tokens instead of controlling the licenses directly. Using License Scheduler, jobs receive a license token before starting the application. The number of tokens available corresponds to the number of licenses available from the license server, so if a token is not available, the job does not start. In this way, the number of licenses that are requested by running jobs does not exceed the number of available licenses. When a job starts, the application is not aware of License Scheduler. The application checks out licenses from the license server in the usual manner.

Use the filters to show data for particular License Scheduler Collectors. Select In Use to show data for only those licenses that are currently in use.

The tabs detailed below also show the data in a variety of formats, including custom graphs.

  • Summary tab. Shows summary information of all License Scheduler features. Select an Action icon to quickly go to the applicable tab for that icon, showing detailed data and any custom graphs for that License Scheduler Collector.
  • Feature tab. Shows detailed information of a selected feature.
  • Clusters tab. Shows cross cluster information for tokens.
  • Projects tab. Shows data in a project view, such as how many licenses the project used or demanded.
  • Distribution tab. Shows LSF license data, such as LSF jobs that checked out the license or non-LSF jobs that checked out the license.
  • Users tab. Shows user data, such as who checked out the license.
  • Checkouts tab. Shows data based on the checkout, such as when the license was checked out.
  • Graphs tab. Shows the License Scheduler data in graph format. Graph management is found in Console > Management > Graphs. Frequency of graph generation is controlled by administrators in Console > Clusters > License Schedulerss.