How to monitor and maintain awareness of your GRC license usage

[Mary Hain]

The GRC Licensing Summary Dashboard enables you to track, forecast, and optimize your GRC usage.

As organizations expand their governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) programs, monitoring license consumption becomes important to manage costs, maintain compliance, and ensure visibility.

The GRC Licensing Summary Dashboard offers a built-in tool to track current license usage, identify trends, and support forward planning. This dashboard tracks licensing consumption for Operator and Lite Operators-entitled products, including Integrated Risk Management (IRM), Business Continuity Management (BCM), and Privacy Management.  

In this post, you'll learn:

• What the GRC Licensing Summary Dashboard does
• Why it matters (the business value)
• How to enable or access it
• Which roles need permissions are needed
• Best practices and tips for using it

What Is the GRC Licensing Summary Dashboard?

The GRC Licensing Summary Dashboard is part of the ServiceNow GRC suite. It gives you a single pane of glass into how your GRC licenses are being used, so you can more easily manage your consumption. 

You can use the dashboard to:

• Display monthly aggregated counts of license consumption, broken down by different GRC product families (e.g. risk, compliance, policy, etc.).
• Track license usage trends over time.
• Estimate next month’s usage based on role allocations and existing consumption patterns.
• Spot spikes, dips, or anomalies in consumption so you can proactively adjust license allocations or address inefficiencies.
  
  

Why it matters: Program value

Here’s why the dashboard is a game-changer. It improves your operational control, cost optimization, and audit-ready insights. Anit’s available out of the box.

Problem / Challenge	How the Dashboard Helps
Lack of visibility into actual license usage	View consumption for each GRC product family to see where usage is heavy or light.
Unexpected license cost overruns	Spot spikes early so you can adjust licensing before renewing or incurring overages.
Underutilized licenses / wasted spend	Reallocate or curtail usage of rarely used licenses.
Forecasting and budgeting issues	Estimate next month’s usage, aiding procurement and budgeting.
Governance and audit readiness	Improve traceability and reporting; help with audits and internal reviews of license usage.

How to enable or access the Dashboard

Here are the steps to turn on and access this feature:

1. Plugin / application installation
   The dashboard is part of the GRC: Risk shared common components plugin, which is automatically installed when you activate Integrated Risk Management, Business Continuity Management, and Privacy Management in your instance.
2. Verify dependencies and data
   Check that your instance has ingestible usage data / license consumption data for the GRC modules (roles, license assignments, etc.).
3. Grant the required role to users
   The primary role needed to view this dashboard is sn_irm_shared_cmn.product_owner. Anyone in your organization who cares about licensing compliance, such as the IRM product owner, should be assigned this role. This role does not consume a license.
4. Navigation (once role is granted)

• Log into your ServiceNow instance.
• Go to the GRC or IRM app menu.
• Find the Licensing Summary or Licensing Overview dashboard in the “Common GRC Features” section.
• If necessary, you can add the dashboard to a homepage or custom menu for easier access.

5. Initial setup / data load
Depending on your instance, initial loading or aggregation of historical license consumption data may take time (hours or days), depending on data volume.

If you don’t see the dashboard after granting roles and verifying the plugin (available in the Shared Common Components plug-in - 19.1.1 version and after), check for plugin activation issues or reach out to ServiceNow support or your administrator.

Roles and access:  Who can use this?

Here’s a breakdown of the roles and access needed

Role	Permissions / Capabilities	Use Case
sn_irm_shared_cmn.product_owner	Primary role to access and manage the licensing dashboard	For administrators or license-management leads
(Optional) Read-only / viewer roles	Create (or extend existing GRC roles) to allow read-only access	For stakeholders who need visibility but not management
System Administrator	Full access: can assign roles, manage plugins, and troubleshoot	For enabling or supporting the dashboard in your instance

The GRC Licensing Summary Dashboard provides information to help you monitor license usage, support planning, and manage ServiceNow investments effectively. When you include license management as part of regular governance practices, you can prevent unexpected issues and efficiently scale your GRC program.

We invite you to try it in your instance.  For additional details, visit product documentation.   

[UTKARSH JAIN]

Please refer to this blog post if you want to track your IRM, BCM, and Privacy Product Licenses