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1E 8.1 (on-premises)

Running your first Compliance License Summary

The first time you start AppClarity it's advisable and helpful to start with viewing the License Summary for the situation where you have no entitlements defined in the selected compliance repository, refer to the Repositories page for more information.

This gives you an established baseline to work with, where you can see what AppClarity is reporting to you without involving entitlements. It also lets you get familiar with the way that the information gets into the License Summary for a particular compliance repository.

Default repositories and permissions needed

The compliance screens in AppClarity rely on selecting a compliance repository that has been associated to both entitlement and inventory repositories. When you installed AppClarity, this created two new default repositories in Settings→Configuration→Repositories to add to the existing default inventory making three:

  1. Default Inventory.

  2. Default Entitlement.

  3. Default Compliance.

To run a Compliance Report, an AppClarity user must have any of the following roles:

  • Full Administrator

  • AppClarity Administrator

  • Compliance Administrator.

Logged-in users with any of the following roles can view the AppClarity→Compliance→License Summary screen:

  • Full Administrator

  • AppClarity Administrator

  • Compliance Administrator

  • Compliance Viewer.

Associating the default repositories

The first time you browse to the AppClarity pages the only repositories available are the default ones. To run the AppClarity→ Compliance→License Summary you will use the Default Compliance repository, it will already be associated with the Default Inventory but you'll also need to associate it with the Default Entitlement repository. Switch to Settings→Configuration→Repositories:

  1. Check the checkbox for the Default Compliance repository, and click Edit.

  2. Once the Default Compliance repository opens in edit mode, select the Default Inventory and Default Entitlement repositories.

  3. Optionally enter a description.

  4. Click Save.

    Associating the default repositories
Viewing the Compliance License Position

Before viewing the Compliance License Position, ensure License Demand Compliance (LDC) reports for Microsoft Core, Oracle Processor, IBM PVU and RedHat Socket have been refreshed.

To run and view License Demand Compliance (LDC) reports :

  1. Switch to AppClarity→License Demand.

  2. On the License Demand Calculation Report screen, select your compliance repository from the dropdown list.

  3. Click Refresh for each report.

  4. Once the report refresh shows as complete, click View Report.

When you have refreshed the LDC reports, refresh the Compliance Report and view License Position for Compliance using the Refresh reports icon on the top right of the page.

The screen should now display the information derived from the reports we just refreshed. Here we can see entries for each product, including the Vendor, Title and Edition and the most significant value, which is in the License Position column.

This shows the status of the licenses for each of those products, as there are no entitlements defined, they'll show negative values. The numbers indicate how many licenses are needed in order to make that product compliant. The License Metric column at the end of the row shows how the licenses are calculated, either by Device, User, Core or by Processor.

Execute action popup
License Position
Viewing Compliance License details

To view the Compliance Details for any of the products displayed:

  1. On the License Postion page check the checkbox one or more products and click Compliance Details.

  2. The License Summary for the selected product or products. From here you can further explore the Compliance Category for a particular product by clicking on the colored Compliance Category bar.

  3. In the License Summary by Installs, you can review the license position for that software and filter a detailed table, for example by Status, Machine Name or by Primary User.

You've just created your first report in AppClarity and had a quick glance at your compliance position, without any entitlements set, showing what types of software are installed in your network and how many licenses must be created in order to make that software compliant.

License Position Jira
230726576.png

Note

The Effective License Position (ELP) shows details for the installation title for product titles where they differ, for example:

  • SQL Server Master Data Services, SQL Server Data Quality Services, SQL Server Integration Services etc. - mapping with the demand for SQL Server

  • RedHat Linux Server installation on VMs - mapped with demand of RedHat Enterprise Linux for Virtual Datacenters.

In the example shown, the License Summary page has been filtered to show results with the title, SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS), then clicking on Compliance Category color bar for SSASshows the ELP for this product. SSAS is now matched with mapped with SQL Server, this means the complete ELP position is shown for SQL Server.

In addition, the ELP for the licensed and mapped titles remain the same for a given Management Group, for example:

  • If there are 100 installs of SSAS in the Global Management Group and 10 in Management Group 1

  • 100 installs of SQL Server in Global and 70 in Management Group 1.

A selection of either SSAS or SQL Server would show a license position of SQL Server for Management Group 1 based on the combined 70 installs of SQL Server and 10 of SSAS.

License Summary
Refreshing reports for your repositories

You can refresh reports from individual AppClarity screens, as well as using the Settings App, by using the refresh icon next to the Last Refreshed box:

Report refresh control

Clicking the dropdown icon next to the refresh icon shows you the last report that was run, a link to the Settings→Monitoring→Process Log and a Status:

  • Green tick - indicates a successful refresh

  • Triangle exclamation - indicates a failed refresh.

Report refresh successful

You can refresh reports from the following pages:

Title page

Sub-Page

Report

Entitlements

Entitlement Summary

Entitlement Consolidation

License / Maintenance

Entitlement Consolidation

Agreement

Entitlement Consolidation

Contract

Entitlement Consolidation

Compliance

License Summary

Compliance

Compliance Summary by Installs

Compliance

License Position

Compliance

License Demand

License Demand Calculation Summary report - first page

License Demand Calculation report

License Demand - Detailed Report

License Demand Calculation report

Reclaim

Usage Summary

Reclaim Product Usage

Reclaim History

Reclaim Reporting

Policies

Reclaim Consolidation

Savings

Reclaim Reporting

Refresh reports using Settings

You can also refresh reports using the Settings app, for example:

  1. Switch to Settings→Configuration→Connectors and click Execute.

  2. In the Execute action popup from Repository select Default Compliance and Action as Generate Report - Compliance, and click Execute.

  3. To monitor the progress of the new action navigate to Settings→Monitoring→Process log to view the Generate Report action running.

  4. When the Generate Report action has completed, switch app to AppClarity→Compliance→License Position.

Refresh reports using Settings
Scheduling a report refresh for a repository

Toautomaticallyrefresh a report for a repository you can set up a schedule:

  1. Under the Settings→Configuration→Schedules and click Add.

  2. In the Add schedule screen for:

    1. Schedule name - enter a logical name for the new schedule.

    2. Repository - select your repository from the dropdown menu.

    3. Action type - select the associated action type you want to schedule.

    4. Frequency - select the frequency.

Note

For any entitlement repository, when a new entitlement is created (which triggers an entitlement consolidation) a Schedule called EntitlementConsolidationScheduler is created for this repository by default, it's set to run on a 24 hrs frequency (daily basis).

Schedule a report
Choosing the columns displayed in reports

You can choose which columns are displayed in AppClarity detail tables to increase readability. On the pages where you can pick the displayed columns you'll see the control highlighted in the example.

Column chooser

When you click on the Choose columns control it opens a popup displaying every column on the current screen, the controls are:

Control

Explanation

Available Columns

Columns which are by default hidden from display on screen. You can still include any of them to display on screen.

Visible Columns

Displays the list of columns displayed on screen.

Mandatory Columns cannot be excluded, the selection controls for these items are disabled. They can still be moved up or down.

Tip

Some pages have mandatory columns and a set of default hidden columns.

Arrow buttons

To move up or move down, exclude or include any column, clicking on the ellipsis displays these additional controls.

Arrow controls

Drag and drop

You can drag and drop columns to change how they are displayed.

Exclude columns

Exclude column button allows you to select columns to exclude from the current display.

For example, in Viewing License Compliance Details we viewed theLicense Summary, using the Choose columns control you can pick which columns are displayed in the table. On this page, the default columns are:

  • Vendor

  • Title

  • Total Installs

  • Total Devices

  • Total Users

  • Compliance Category

  • Unknown Installs

  • Underutilized Installs

  • Licenses Applied

  • Reclaim Policies.

Each page also has some mandatory columns which cannot be excluded from display. When you click the Choose columns icon the excluded columns are greyed out and cannot be removed.

For example, in License Summary you cannot remove these columns:

  • Vendor

  • Title

  • Total Installs

  • Total Devices

  • Total Users

  • Compliance Category

Mandatory columns

From this screen we chose to exclude Unknown Installs and move Underutilized Installs to the top of the list.

To apply this view to the current report, click Save.

You can also choose Restore to reset the column chooser UI or Cancel to cancel your changes and exit the Choose columns control.

Note

When you refresh reports on a page where you have amended the displayed columns, the report view will reset back to its default view once the refresh completes and the page reloads.

Column Picker example
Column Picker applied