Reconciliation of licenses across global entities
Summarize
Summary of Reconciliation of Licenses Across Global Entities
This guide outlines how to create consumption rules for entitlements in ServiceNow to manage license usage across different global entities. These rules allow organizations to limit entitlement consumption to specific entities, enabling efficient license sharing without the need for allocations. This is essential for cost centers that need to purchase licenses for software used on devices across departments.
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Key Features
- Creation of Consumption Rules: Set rules that restrict entitlement usage to defined entities such as Company, Department, Region, Cost Center, or Country.
- Linking Rules to Entitlements: After creating consumption rules, link them to specific entitlements to control access and usage.
- Parent and Child Hierarchies: Easily manage consumption rules for parent and child entities, reducing administrative effort when updating rules.
- License Pools: Define license pools that reserve rights for specific entities, ensuring that a portion of licenses is guaranteed for their use.
- Allocations: Allow for exceptions where allocations can exceed consumption rules, giving priority to specific departments while still allowing broader access.
- Upgrade Considerations: Understand how to manage consumption rules when upgrading from pre-existing releases in ServiceNow.
Key Outcomes
By implementing consumption rules, ServiceNow customers can:
- Streamline license management across multiple global entities, ensuring compliance and cost-effectiveness.
- Enhance visibility into entitlement usage through detailed reporting and consumption breakdowns.
- Quickly adapt to organizational changes by modifying existing rules without needing to create new ones.
- Maintain control over software usage while enabling flexibility for departments to share resources.
Share entitlements across different entities within your organization by creating consumption rules for entitlements.
Limit consumption of entitlements to specific set of entities during the reconciliation process. This allows a cost center to purchase licenses and provide it as a service to other cost centers to license software running on their devices without requiring allocations.
Overview of consumption rules
Create consumption rules for entitlements to restrict all entities from using that entitlement. If a consumption rule isn't defined for an entitlement and when the reconciliation process runs, any entity can use that entitlement regardless of who owns that entitlement.
- Company
- Department
- Region
- Cost center
- Country
A single consumption rule can be used across multiple entitlements that helps in reuse of consumption rules.
After you create consumption rules in the License operations view, you must link a consumption rule to one or more entitlements in the Entitlement Consumption Rules related list in the entitlement page. After you link a consumption rule to an entitlement, consumption is limited to the users or devices belonging to at least one of the specified entities specified in the consumption rule.
- with grouping: The reconciliation result appears in the form of product results, software model results, and licenses metric results; all generated individually for each group.
- without grouping: The reconciliation result appears in the form of product results, software model results, and license metric results, all under a single heading.
The License Consumption Breakdown [samp_lmr_consumption_result] table reports the allocated and unallocated rights used per license metric results per consumption rule.
Further reporting can be done through the consumption rule column in the Licenses Required By [samp_licenses_required_by] table. The consumption rule column stamps the consumption rule satisfied by that entity.
Use case for consumption rules
Let's say that you've created three separate consumption rules for three departments, namely Sales, HR, and Marketing.
You now link all these three consumption rules to an entitlement, titled ENT A. After you run reconciliation, ENT A can be used by the Sales, HR, and Marketing departments. No allocations need to be created for ENT A.
Parent and child hierarchy
Consumption rules also support parent or child hierarchy for groups. If you have a consumption rule for parent company A, you can choose to include child company B and child company C without creating separate rules.
The Create New Consumption Rule page in the Enterprise Asset Workspace lets you include the children of the company, department, and cost center in the consumption rule. This reduces the effort required to create individual consumption rules for each entity and to update consumption rules when new entities are added, update, or deleted.
License pools
Consumption rules allow you to define license pools for entities. A license pool is a reservation of rights for a group entity defined on a consumption rule. License pools are specific to an entity per entitlement. If no license pool is defined, the entity can consume rights, but none will be set aside as a guarantee.
For example, an entitlement with 100 available rights can have an HR consumption rule with a license pool of 50. This sets aside 50 rights for HR consumers, and the remaining 50 rights can be used by HR or other entities defined in the consumption rules.
You can view the consumption rules and associated license pools in the Entitlement Consumption Rules related list in the entitlement page.
Allocations
Allocations take precedence over consumption rules. You don't need to create consumption rules for allocations to work. For example, let's say you have a consumption rule that states that only HR devices can use this entitlement. This entitlement can still include allocations outside of HR such as Sales or Marketing.
Allocations are automatically counted towards license pools when the first applicable consumption rule is satisfied. This is the default setting, but allocations will still be honored even if there is no defined consumption rule or license pool.
Any new allocations that exceed the license pool count will be honored. Any allocations that do not satisfy a consumption rule will also be honored.
Upgrading from Pre Utah releases
- Grouping: Company, Cost Center,
Region, Department, or
Country is selected. A consumption rule is automatically created for
the grouping entity selected if the entitlement is in use. For example, if
Department is selected, and Company is selected
as the subgroup, then one combined consumption rule is created for both the group, Department
and the subgroup, Company. When reconciliation is run, the entitlement usage is restricted to
only the Department group and the Company subgroup.Note:An entitlement is considered to be in use, if in the Entitlement table, the Install status column has the value 1.
- Non-grouping: None is selected. No consumption rule is created as reconciliation runs without grouping. The entitlements can be used by any group.