Tracking license usage in 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 manually prepare a consolidated report.
Complete the following actions to create a consolidated report.
- Get the
products_daily_<reported_period>_<cluster hostname>.csvreport that is a part of an audit snapshot for each cluster in your environment. For more information, see: Retrieving license metric usage and IBM License Service API schema. - Add the
metricQuantityvalue of a product from a specific date for every cluster. - Record the sum for the date.
- Repeat the preceding steps for each date within the requested period.
- Find the highest cumulative value. This value is the highest license usage of the product within the reported period.
Example
Example 1. License usage of IBM Cloud Pak® A on Cluster 1 as it is reported in cluster1_products-daily-2020-03-01-2020-03-05_<cluster1 hostname>.csv.
| name | metricQuantityDate | metricQuantity | metricName |
|---|---|---|---|
| IBM Cloud Pak A | 3/1/2020 | 5 | VIRTUAL_PROCESSOR_CORE |
| IBM Cloud Pak A | 3/2/2020 | 30 | VIRTUAL_PROCESSOR_CORE |
| IBM Cloud Pak A | 3/3/2020 | 30 | VIRTUAL_PROCESSOR_CORE |
| IBM Cloud Pak A | 3/4/2020 | 29 | VIRTUAL_PROCESSOR_CORE |
| IBM Cloud Pak A | 3/5/2020 | 29 | VIRTUAL_PROCESSOR_CORE |
Example 2. License usage of IBM Cloud Pak® A on Cluster 2 as it is reported in cluster2_products-daily-2020-03-01-2020-03-05_<cluster2 hostname>.csv.
| name | metricQuantityDate | metricQuantity | metricName |
|---|---|---|---|
| IBM Cloud Pak A | 3/1/2020 | 5 | VIRTUAL_PROCESSOR_CORE |
| IBM Cloud Pak A | 3/2/2020 | 10 | VIRTUAL_PROCESSOR_CORE |
| IBM Cloud Pak A | 3/3/2020 | 10 | VIRTUAL_PROCESSOR_CORE |
| IBM Cloud Pak A | 3/4/2020 | 9 | VIRTUAL_PROCESSOR_CORE |
| IBM Cloud Pak A | 3/5/2020 | 9 | VIRTUAL_PROCESSOR_CORE |
Example 3. An example of how to prepare a table to find the highest license usage in the environment where IBM Cloud Pak A is deployed on Cluster 1 and Cluster 2.
| name | metricQuantityDate | metricQuantity on Cluster 1 | Metric Quantity on Cluster 2 | Total license usage | MetricName |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IBM Cloud Pak A | 3/1/2020 | 5 | 5 | 10 | VIRTUAL_PROCESSOR_CORE |
| IBM Cloud Pak A | 3/2/2020 | 30 | 10 | 40 | VIRTUAL_PROCESSOR_CORE |
| IBM Cloud Pak A | 3/3/2020 | 30 | 10 | 40 | VIRTUAL_PROCESSOR_CORE |
| IBM Cloud Pak A | 3/4/2020 | 29 | 9 | 38 | VIRTUAL_PROCESSOR_CORE |
| IBM Cloud Pak A | 3/5/2020 | 29 | 9 | 38 | VIRTUAL_PROCESSOR_CORE |
License Service Reporter
Note: License Service has an extension for tracking license usage in multicluster environment called License Service Reporter. However, at this point License Service Reporter is only supported with License Service instance that is shipped with IBM Cloud Pak foundational services and integrated with IBM Cloud Paks.
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.
For more information about License Service Reporter, see Tracking license usage in multicluster environment with License Service Reporter.