License usage view

  • Release version: Washingtondc
  • Updated February 1, 2024
  • 6 minutes to read
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    Summary of License Usage View

    The License Usage View provides a comprehensive overview of your organization's software license position, enabling you to monitor compliance, forecast license needs, and manage software assets effectively. Access this view through Software Asset Workspace, under License Usage. It is designed to help you stay compliant by tracking license consumption against purchased rights.

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    Key Features

    • Pin and manage publishers for easy access.
    • View key compliance metrics including over-licensed amounts and true-up costs.
    • Filter and sort data by compliance status and metrics.
    • Run reconciliations and view results to ensure compliance.
    • Access detailed publisher compliance status, indicating whether they are compliant, non-compliant, or have failed reconciliation.
    • View publisher cards specific to your software products, reducing clutter with a Published status filter.
    • Access historical reconciliation results and removal candidates to reclaim unused software installations.
    • Create and manage various reports related to software compliance and lifecycle.

    Key Outcomes

    By utilizing the License Usage View, you can ensure that your organization remains compliant with software licensing requirements, avoid potential penalties, and optimize your software usage. You can quickly assess the compliance status of publishers and take action based on reconciliation results, which ultimately supports better financial management of software assets. Reports generated from this view provide insights that help in strategic decision-making regarding software purchases and usage.

    Use the license usage view as a single plane to understand the license position of all software products, remediate non-compliance, view reconciliation results, view, or add removal candidates and view Software Asset Management related reports.

    The License usage view lets your organizations license usage trends and helps forecast the needs of your organization by trending the number of licenses required against the number of licenses purchased. Stay in compliance by purchasing additional rights before software consumption surpasses the number of rights owned.

    You can access the License usage view by navigating to Software asset > Software Asset Workspace > License usage.

    Figure 1. License usage view
    License usage view
    Use the License usage view to:
    • pin publishers (user specific, saved).
    • view key metrics for the publishers, such as over-licensed amount and true-up cost.
    • filter by domain and compliance status.
    • sort by True-up cost, over-licensed amount, and potential savings.
    • run a reconciliation and view its results.
    • be informed about the last reconciliation run.
    • view and add new removal candidates.
    • view and export reports.
    • view publisher cards specific to the software products that you published as part of the phase-wise implementation of Software Asset Management. For more information, see Publish a specific set of your software products.
      Note:
      The filter for published status is automatically applied.

    Publishers tab

    View the compliance status of all your publishers. Each publisher card displays its color-coded compliance status along with the percentage of compliance. As the products get compliant, the color changes to green.
    • compliant: Indicated by the color green. All products under the publisher are complaint.
    • non-compliant: Indicated by the color red. All products under the publisher aren’t compliant.
    A red icon Reconciliation failure icon on a publisher card indicates that reconciliation failed for that publisher. Open the card to read the details. For details on which specific products failed, refer to the navigation tree on the Publisher details page.
    Note:
    Even though a publisher card may display a red icon, you may not notice any failed products on the navigation tree as the failure may have occurred before the product results were generated.
    The pinned publishers are displayed followed by unpinned publishers. To view the compliance of a few selected publishers, you can pin publishers for easy access. Select the rightmost bookmark icon on a card to pin it. As soon as you pin a publisher card, it moves from the Unpinned publishers section to the Pinned publishers section.
    Note:
    The list of pinned publishers is saved on a per-user basis. The pinned publishers are stored in the Pinned User Publisher [samp_pinned_user_publisher] table.
    View publisher cards only related to the software products that you manage in a phase-wise implementation of Software Asset Management using the Published status filter. Filtering by Published status enables you to reduce clutter on the License usage view.
    Note:
    The Published status filter is shown only when the system property com.snc.samp.manage.published.products is enabled on your ServiceNow instance. By default, this filter is set to Published and all the publisher cards show details of published products. However, you can also view license compliance reports related to the products that aren't published by setting this filter to Unpublished. To view reports related to all the products, clear the Published status filter.

    To view compliance details about a publisher, select a publisher card. A summary of that publisher's compliance appears in the Publisher details page.

    Figure 2. Publisher details page
    Publisher details page
    The navigation tree for the publisher appears on the left-hand side of the page along with one of the following compliant status:
    • Complaint: Reconciliation completed successfully and it was determined that installations and subscriptions are in compliance.
    • Not complaint: Reconciliation completed successfully and it was determined that the installations and subscriptions aren’t in compliance with licenses bought
    • Failed: Reconciliation failure occurred and so can't correctly determine compliance. If a product fails, then everything underneath that product such as software model results also fails.

    The navigation view shows license compliance details of products that were published. Scroll down to the reports mentioned in the Publisher metrics table to view details of published products. If you want to view details and compliance results of other unpublished products, you must set the Published status filter to Unpublished.

    A brief summary of metrics appears along with related lists pertaining to that publisher. For details on the metrics, refer to the Publisher metrics table. For details on the related lists, refer to License usage publisher fields in workspace.

    The navigation tree enables you to perform the following actions:
    • drill down to a product, software model, or license metric to view the calculation and compliance information from the latest reconciliation results.
    • filter products (active filtering, including collapsed items).
    • expand and collapse tree links.

    By default, the navigation tree is collapsed.

    Table 1. Publisher metrics
    Report Source Description
    True-up cost Product Result [samp_product_result] Estimated cost of remediating unlicensed installations based on the lowest number of rights needed (rights needed multiplied by average price per right from entitlements).

    The lowest cost from Purchase Rights remediation options.

    Savings Removal Candidate

    [samp_sw_reclamation_candidate]

    Cost saved if removal candidates are reclaimed.
    Software model statistics Software Model [cmdb_software_product_model] Status of the software models with regard to discovery maps, entitlements, and downgrade rights.
    Progress indicators

    Software Installation [cmdb_sam_sw_install]

    Software Subscription [samp_sw_subscription]

    Oracle Options [samp_oracle_options].

    SAP Engine Usage [samp_sap_sw_client_access]

    SAP Users [samp_sap_system_user]

    Requested Item [sc_req_item]

    Removal Candidate [samp_sw_reclamation_candidate]

    Software Installation [cmdb_sam_sw_install]

    Removal candidate [samp_sw_reclamation_candidate]

    Entity unlicensed reason [samp_entity_unlicensed_reason]

    Indicates the compliance progress already made for this publisher, product, and software model. The progress indicators differ for each publisher. The following are some of the indicators:
    • Unlicensed installs: refers to installations for which you have purchased some entitlements, but the rights owned are not sufficient to cover all the entities that require rights.
    • Installs requiring action: indicates an action that you need to perform to fix an issue for an installation, such as problems with CIs, entitlement, or software model setup.
      Note:
      An installation may have more than one issue. You need to take action to resolve all the issues for an installation.
    • Ignored installs: installations ignored from the reconciliation process.
    • Unlicensed subscriptions: subscriptions that are unlicensed.
    • Unlicensed client access: refers to unlicensed CAL records on account of not having enough rights on entitlements to cover the CAL records.
    • Number of reclamations: Number of removal candidates created.
    • Average time to fulfill requisitions
    • PPN suggestions pending disposition

    Select the number adjacent to each category for a more detailed explanation of each installation, including the reason and causes of their unlicensed status.

    Reconciliation tab

    You can view all the historical reconciliation results in this tab along with the following status:

    • Completed: If all the products and publishers completed reconciliation successfully.
    • Failed: If all the products and publishers failed reconciliation.
    • Partially Completed: If only some products or publishers completed reconciliation successfully.

    Results of the latest reconciliation run are shown in the License usage view. For more details, see Software reconciliation for compliance.

    Removal candidates tab

    View a list of all removal candidates in this tab. Removal candidates are used to reclaim software installations that aren’t being used.

    You can also create removal candidates. For more details, see Add a software removal candidate in workspace.

    Reports tab

    To create and manage reports, see Create and manage reports in workspace.