Maturity of tracking Tier2 Network/Floating licenses

Software Licensing
1

Hi ITAM experts,

I am interested in the maturity of how your companies monitor and analyse their Tier 2 Network/floating licenses, the licenses managed by a license daemon (Flexnet/flexlm, Reprise, Sentinel, DSLS/LUM, Altium, LM-X, Codemeter/Wibu, etc)? i.e A company buys 200 licenses to serve 300+ engineers/analysts.

The Tier2 vendors are typically IBM, Micro Focus, Siemens PLM, Mathworks, Dassault Systèmes, PTC, Ansys, Autodesk (via felxlm), ESRI, Synopsys, Cadence, etc.

Common products are found within the R&D side of the business such as CAD, CAx, Simulation (FEA, CFD, Multi-body), EDA/ECAD/PCB, PLM, PDM, GIS, Maths, MBSE, etc… With vendor tools like Solidworks, MathCAD, Catia, Siemens NX, PTC Creo, AutoCAD, REVIT, Cadence, MSC, MathCAD, Teamcenter, 3Dexperience, Simulia, Nastran, DOORS, etc.

The majority of these tools are protected by a Flexlm/Flexnet license daemon. A flexlm log file lists the Check-IN, check-OUT and denial information, which some companies look at visually. Or companies often run an ‘lmstat’ command script to get a point-in-time view of who is consuming which licenses.

If your company has these tools, what maturity or approach do you use?

  • We do not monitor license daemon style licenses
  • We use an ad-hoc script to collect daemon style license info (on demand)
  • We use a script or tool to constantly monitor daemon style licenses (active)
  • We use a tool to actively manage and improve license usage ratio’s (pro-active)

0 voters

Very few companies I speak to are using an active or pro-active approach to these expensive licenses.

What are your experiences with managing these licenses and do you plan to move ahead in maturity?

Thanks Paul

p.s. I unapologetically live and breath flexlm and license daemon style licenses - ask me anything.

3 Likes
2

OpenLM has pretty good coverage for this need. Can manage concurrent/network licensing, denials, etc for 56 types of license servers, which cover a large range of publishers that have these expensive engineering/lab type licenses. License Managers Monitored - OpenLM Software License Management

OpeniT is another in this space https://openit.com/

1 Like
3

Hi Ryan,

Thank you for your reply and for listing out a few of the tools available in this space. I guess we should list out some of the other players in this niche market:-

  • Flexera Flexnet Manager ($$$$) - Dedicated to flexnet license daemons, complex implementation.
  • TeamEDA ($$) - Wide daemon coverage. Simple install, integrations and cost model (SAM tool included).
  • OpenLM ($$$) - Wide coverage, integration with ServiceNow.
  • OpenIT ($$$) - Point solutions.
  • JTB flexreport ($$) - A number of useful charts.

Many thanks Paul

2 Likes
4

My interest here is mostly historical - I came from an organization that had a heavy investment in applications (engineering-related) that used license daemon style licenses. But even there, we did not perform much ‘active management’.

At my current organization, we have a small number of applications that use floating licenses and are served by a license daemon. Most of our licensing has migrated away from pooled/floating and instead are directly assigned to a device or user. Few mission-critical applications are pooled/floating so we do not invest time & effort in monitoring those.

At my current and previous org, our team was responsive only in situations where an internal customer expressed a conflict, such as “I can’t get a floating license when I need it” or “my department doesn’t have enough”. Since we do not centrally fund those applications our response in the latter is “let’s help you buy enough so that you always have enough in the pool” or “let’s find another solution such as a dedicated license for your machine”. So, we are involved in problem resolution only. Frankly, because of the complexities of cost-sharing these applications in our distributed environment, it is difficult enough to get the constituent departments to agree to cost share it at all, and they are not interested in our SAM team attempting to right-size the pooled licenses (the risk to them of not having a license when they need it is greater than the cost savings opportunity). So, we have not invested effort into active management.