Licence Usage - Licence Overview

The LICENSE INFORMATION page appears when you follow the menu sequence: Admin -> Miscellaneous -> License Overview.

The TOTAL LICENSE USAGE tab in the LICENSE INFORMATION page, helps administrators evaluate whether eG license usage is optimal or is excessive, and accordingly decide on future license requirements.

• The Total Monitors listing indicates the total number of basic and premium monitors that the current installation of eG Enterprise is allowed to use, the total number of such monitors that are currently utilized, and the overall usage percentage. The number of Monitors running and not running is also indicated.

• The total number of Premium Monitors that an eG installation is allowed to use is automatically computed as the difference between the Total Monitors and Basic Monitors. For instance, if the eG license allows 20 monitors totally and 7 basic monitors, then 13 will be automatically set as the maximum number of premium monitors that can be configured in the environment. If required, the customer can even have 19 basic monitors, reserving 1 premium monitor for the 1 external agent that is a must for every eG installation.

• The count and percent usage of Named User/VM or Concurrent User/VM licenses (if any).

• The license specifies the maximum number of Services that the manager can support, and the number of services currently managed;

• In addition, the license imposes a ceiling on the number of Applications and the number of unique IPs (refers to the number of Monitored Targets) that can be monitored. Therefore, if a user monitors 4 applications executing on a single host, the eG Enterprise system will count the number of applications as 4 and the number of monitored targets as 1.

• Restrictions on the number of Users permitted, the number of Network Devices that can be monitored, and the maximum number of topology Segments that can be configured are also specified in the license. The number of network devices and topology segments currently monitored are also displayed as part of the Total License Usage.

• The license also specifies the maximum number of Endpoints licenses that the manager can support if IGEL Endpoints components are currently managed in your environment;

• The license specifies the maximum number of O365 users that the manager can support;

The Total license usage tab page not only indicates the number of licenses utilized, but also leads you to the exact components/network devices/segments/services/users (as the case may be) that are using these licenses. To get to this usage break-up, click on the Used licenses count of any Attribute listed in the Total license usage tab page. For instance, clicking on the Used count of the Premium Monitors license attribute will lead you to the page where you can view the complete list of components that are utilizing the premium monitor licenses.

Clicking on the Agent Status button will lead you to the page that provides you with the status of the agents of a selected type.

Sometimes, administrators are forced to manually replace the eG license with a new one whenever the eG license expires or when the scope of monitoring expanded in the target environment. In such situations, administrators are required to upload a new license file obtained from eG Enterprise. Often, manually replacing the license file was tedious and the whole process was error-prone. To simplify this process and ensure error-free license upload, administrators can use the Upload License button in this page. Clicking on the Upload License button will invoke a pop up window using which you can browse and upload a license file. Once the license is uploaded successfully, the eG manager will be automatically restarted.

Managed service providers (MSPs) deploy monitoring in a multi-tenant configuration, so multiple customers are hosted using a common eG management server. In such environments, MSPs need to be able to track monitoring license usage for each customer, so that usage billing can be done accordingly. For this purpose, the LICENSE INFORMATION page can be configured to report license usage at a granular level - i.e., report the number of licenses used by each user and zone configured in the management console. Besides being useful for billing, this information is also useful for planning future licensing requirements.

Named User Licensing

By default, the eG monitoring license is server-based. For each server (with a unique nick name), an eG monitor license is required. This licensing model is appropriate for applications that are licensed per server - e.g., web servers, databases, J2EE, infrastructure servers, etc. Applications that handle user accesses like Citrix XenApp and Microsoft Remote Desktop Services are often licensed per user, rather than per server. To align the monitoring solution's licensing with the application!s licensing, eG Enterprise supports a named user licensing option. This licensing option is applicable to Thin Client and VDI environments only. If this option is enabled, you can monitor any number of Citrix XenApp servers, Microsoft Terminal servers, 2X Terminal servers, and/or VDI servers in your environment without any monitor licenses, provided the total number of unique users who accessed all these servers over the last 90 days is within a licensed limit. If the Named User license is violated, the eG agents will stop monitoring all managed Thin Client or VDI components, and will no longer allow administrators to add/manage more components of such types, until additional Named User licenses are purchased. A mix of server-based and user-based licenses can also be used - e.g., all the key server applications like Active Directory, SQL server, Java applications can be monitored with agent/agentless monitor licenses and thin-client servers can be monitored with named user licenses.

• Named User licensing governs only the following component-types: Citrix XenApp, Citrix MF XP, Microsoft Terminal server, 2x Terminal server, VMware vSphere VDI, Citrix XenServer - VDI, Microsoft Hyper-V - VDI, RHEV Hypervisor- VDI, and Oracle VirtualBox. For monitoring all other component types, Basic and/or Premium Monitor licenses are mandatory! For instance, a typical Citrix environment may comprise of many Citrix XenApp servers, an Active Directory for user authentication, Profile servers, Licensing servers, Web Interface servers, and more. In this case, you can use Named User licensing for monitoring the Citrix XenApp servers alone - i.e., you can add any number of XenApp servers for monitoring without any premium monitor licenses! For monitoring the Active Directory, Profile, Licensing, and Web Interface servers, you have to have a license per server.

• Once the Named User licensing patch is applied, you will not be able to make any changes to the component types mentioned above, using eG's Integration Console plugin. In other words, you can no longer use the Integration Console interface to build new monitoring capabilities or modify the existing models/monitoring capabilities for the following component types - Citrix XenApp, Citrix MF XP, Microsoft Terminal server, 2x Terminal server, VMware vSphere VDI, Citrix XenServer - VDI, Microsoft Hyper-V - VDI, RHEV Hypervisor- VDI, and Oracle VirtualBox.

• If the Named User license capability is enabled, then the REPORT BY USER flag that is available for some of the tests associated with the VMware vSphere VDI, Citrix XenServer - VDI, Microsoft Hyper-v - VDI, RHEV Hypervisor - VDI, and Oracle VirtualBox component-types, will be disabled. In other words, you cannot override the default status of this flag (which is Yes) during test configuration. In this case therefore, all such tests will always report the name of the user who is currently logged into each virtual desktop as the descriptor. Likewise, the aggregate user sessions flag that is available for a few other tests mapped to the above-mentioned component-types will also be disabled if the Named User licensing mode is activated. Since this flag is set to No by default, these tests will always report a set of metrics for every username on guestname; the default status of this flag too cannot be altered using the test configuration web page in the eG administrative interface. In the same manner, the REPORTBYCLIENTNAME flag that is available for the Citrix Users test and the Citrix Applications test mapped to the Citrix XenApp server will also be disabled if Named User licensing is applied. This means that the detailed diagnosis of these tests will not include the clientname column, which displays the host name of the client machine from which users accessed applications on the XenApp server.

To enable users to track the usage of their Named User licenses, this page displays the following against the head, Named Users:

• Allowed: The total number of Named Users who are permitted by the eG license to access the managed Thin Client and VDI components in the environment;

• Used: The total number of unique users who actually accessed the managed Thin Client and VDI components during the last 90 days. This section additionally indicates the number of user licenses currently being utilized per user type ; this way, you can figure out who is using the maximum number of licenses – is it the VDI users? Citrix users? or Terminal users?

  Note that the user types displayed here depend upon the types of components that are managed in your environment - for instance, if you do not see the number of ‘Citrix Users’ then it indicates that no Citrix components have been managed in your environment.

• Available: The number of Named User licenses that are currently unused (i.e., Available); this is the difference between the number of named users who are Allowed to access the managed components and the number of Used named user licenses; a value close to 0 indicates that your eG installation is about to violate the Named User license, and that you may have to obtain additional Named User licenses to avoid such an eventuality.

• Usage (%): The percentage of Allowed named user licenses that are currently Used; this is a good indicator of how effectively the Named User licenses are being utilized by your environment and whether more of these licenses need to be obtained in the immediate future. Against the VDI Users, Terminal Users, and Citrix Users sub-sections, you can view the percentage of total Allowed licenses that are currently been utilized by Citrix, Terminal, and VDI users; in the event of repeated violations of the Named User license, you can use this break-up to figure out where the user density is high - in Citrix environments? VDI environments? or Microsoft Terminal environments? Here again, the user types displayed depend upon the types of components that are managed in your environment.

To track how the named user licenses are utilized per day, click on the icon against Named Users in this page. The TOTAL NAMED USERS REPORT pop up window will then appear, which graphically depicts the number of users who accessed the managed thin client and VDI components every day during the last 2 weeks (by default). If the eG manager reports a license violation, you can use this graph to quickly figure out how many times in the last 2 weeks the violation has occurred and on which days. You can change the timeline of this graph by picking a different Duration, and you can change the dimension of this graph by selecting a different option from the Graph drop-down.

Clicking on the icon near Named Users will reveal the Named Users Report.

To know more on how the eG Enterprise detects and deals with a Named User License Violation, refer to the Administering eG Enterprise manual.

Concurrent User Licensing

The concurrent user licensing model is ideal for environments where a large number of users access the servers every day, but only a small subset of this user population accesses the servers concurrently - i.e., at the same time. For example, in a university, you could have thousands of students coming in every day; but, every time a class is in session, you will have a few students accessing their desktops simultaneously to attend the class. If you opt for the named user licensing model here, you will have to obtain licenses for all the users who log into their desktops each day; this may prove to be expensive. The concurrent user licensing model on the other hand, will be more cost-effective in such environments, as you will have to obtain a license for only those users who access their desktops concurrently. Like named user licensing, Concurrent user licensing too is applicable to Thin Client and VDI environments only. If this option is enabled, you can monitor any number of Citrix XenApp servers, Microsoft RDS servers, 2X Terminal servers, and/or VDI servers in your environment without any monitor licenses, provided the maximum number of users who access these servers every day during the last 10 days is within a stipulated limit. At configured intervals (default: 30 minutes), the eG manager automatically computes the total number of users who accessed all the managed Thin Client and VDI components in the environment during the last 30 minutes (by default), and stores this user count in the eG backend. The user count records so collected during the course of the day are compared at the end of the day to identify the maximum number of concurrent users for that day. This maximum number is compared with the licensed number of concurrent users to capture violations (if any). If this license is violated in 7 out of the last 10 days, the eG agents will stop monitoring all managed Thin Client or VDI components, and will no longer allow administrators to add/manage more components of such types, until additional concurrent user licenses are purchased.

Endpoints Licensing

The Endpoints licensing is ideal for environments where IGEL Enpoints component is installed. To track how the licenses are utilized per day in such environments, click on the icon against Endpoints in this page. The TOTAL ENDPOINTS DAY WISE REPORT pop up window will then appear, which graphically depicts the number of users who accessed the managed IGEL Endpoints components every day during the last 2 weeks (by default). If the eG manager reports a license violation, you can use this graph to quickly figure out how many times in the last 2 weeks the violation has occurred and on which days. You can change the timeline of this graph by picking a different Duration, and you can change the dimension of this graph by selecting a different option from the Graph drop-down. To know more, click here

Clicking on the icon near Endpoints will reveal the ENDPOINTS REPORT.

O365 Users Licensing

The O365 Users licensing is ideal for monitoring Office365 components in your environment. To track how the O365 user licenses are utilized per day in your environment, click on the icon against O365 Users in this page. The TOTAL O365 USERS DAY WISE REPORT pop up window will then appear, which graphically depicts the number of users who accessed the managed Office365 components every day during the last 2 weeks (by default). If the eG manager reports a license violation, you can use this graph to quickly figure out how many times in the last 2 weeks the violation has occurred and on which days. You can change the timeline of this graph by picking a different Duration, and you can change the dimension of this graph by selecting a different option from the Graph drop-down. To know more, click here.

Clicking on the icon near Endpoints will reveal the O365 USERS REPORT