How you can keep track of your License Management

Hi all – I can’t remember how many times admins have asked me: “Do you have any way to keep track of licenses of our tools when you spin up infrastructure and workflows for our users?”

It seems there is no tool or way to do this given each vendor, whether software or hardware, has their own licensing scheme or their own tool to handle licensing. We have never found a tool that can handle other vendor’s licensing (imagine Cisco licensing controlling Juniper licensing). Everyone remembers the Oracle letter that went out years ago that struck fear into every IT department saying they will audit your use of Adobe tools if you don’t come clean about how many users you have. So violating SLAs can be a costly problem.

So, how can IT license admins solve this problem? If they are savvy admins, all of their tools are likely to be controlled through their infrastructure (whether cloud based or on premise) with users having a common framework used to provision and use their infrastructure and workflow(tasks, tools, etc.) within their control. In the new IT world today, some call these environments a "sandbox" in which their data, tools and infrastructure all reside.

Given that the framework controls all the things that have licenses (tools, infrastructure, services, apps, clouds) wouldn’t it be great if the framework could count, control and even allow for scheduling and reserving control so that one does not violate your SLAs?

It just so happens that some frameworks today can do this. CloudShell from TSI/Quali has the ability to support these tools/infrastructure and through some built in ways, allow IT admins to control the usage of these licenses and even protect users from over extending the licensing for their given license tools, whether software or hardware.

So in CloudShell, we can define license resources that can be controlled, and reserved to maintain and guarantee that SLAs are not violated. In addition, it allows for efficient scheduling so that these licenses are used and are not idle. Imagine being able to schedule out production test, or a training or exercise and scaling it without worrying about exceeding the license quotas you have. Also, imagine the license metrics feedback that management can get so as to properly scale license purchases for the future removing bottlenecks and planning for peak usage periods.

I encourage you to reach out today about your experience managing your user licenses.

We would love to hear from you and your experience with this issue.

Have a safe and healthy week,

Best regards,

Chuck Reynolds – Founder and CTO