21-Topaz I

Question

License monitoring

Forum|Forum|13 years ago
March 27, 2013
26 replies
22329 views

So what is everyone using now-a-days to monitor the licenses of Pro/E?

Steve G

Licensing

D

DonSenchuk

12-Amethyst

ptcstatus in a command prompt.

You just have to set a 'Path' system variable to point to the correct folder (<loadpoint>\Creo 2.0\Parametric\bin)

In Reply to Stephen Galayda:

So what is everyone using now-a-days to monitor the licenses of Pro/E?

Steve G

A

amedina

1-Visitor

with the ptcstatus, we modified one line of code and then the intern made a
sql based local site showing the status: we list each user by name and what
license he/she is using on a table above this graph. I can't show it
because it has the names of our users. I renamed the licenses so people
won't jump to Flex3C right away like it used to happen.

[image: Inline image 1]

A

amedina

1-Visitor

if anyone is interested, my intern starts again in may and I can have her
contact you or anyone else to see if she wants to do a little contract job.
She is also a java developer in the making and knows j-link from a few apps
she made for us. I'll ask her for my cut when she's my boss some time in
the future.

M

mjenkins

10-Marble

ptcstatus but there is an interesting note in our ANSYS license log (which uses FlexLM also) that reads:

14:43:21 (lmgrd) This log is intended for debug purposes only.
14:43:21 (lmgrd) In order to capture accurate license
14:43:21 (lmgrd) usage data into an organized repository,
14:43:21 (lmgrd) please enable report logging. Use Flexera Software, Inc.'s
14:43:21 (lmgrd) software license administration solution,
14:43:21 (lmgrd) FLEXnet Manager, to readily gain visibility
14:43:21 (lmgrd) into license usage data and to create
14:43:21 (lmgrd) insightful reports on critical information like
14:43:21 (lmgrd) license availability and usage. FLEXnet Manager
14:43:21 (lmgrd) can be fully automated to run these reports on
14:43:21 (lmgrd) schedule and can be used to track license
14:43:21 (lmgrd) servers and usage across a heterogeneous
14:43:21 (lmgrd) network of servers including Windows NT, Linux
14:43:21 (lmgrd) and UNIX. Contact Flexera Software, Inc. at
14:43:21 (lmgrd) www.flexerasoftware.com for more details on how to
14:43:21 (lmgrd) obtain an evaluation copy of FLEXnet Manager
14:43:21 (lmgrd) for your enterprise.

So following up on that, you can read more about it at:

http://www.flexerasoftware.com/products/flexnet-manager.htm

I am guessing that this could be used to analyze ProE usage with ultimate precision!

In Reply to Stephen Galayda:

So what is everyone using now-a-days to monitor the licenses of Pro/E?

Steve G

K

kimndave9

1-Visitor

Nice - I used to have a utility that did the same but pulled the result
into Excel. It's good to have someone proactive in system administration.

I wonder when lunch time is.

Dave S.

1_blankfilename.txt

A

amedina

1-Visitor

I can adjust ours to less than one minute, but I fail to see the purpose of
more definition. We have it so that it updates every 5 minutes and on
demand for those frustrated users. Also if you Click on the user name, you
get a communicator pop up with their user name ready to contact them. Users
use this to contact each other in cases where the license is not available.
The IT guys have the flexera thing and they never use it or share the info.
Its too complex. Our system works from a computer (server) calling
ptcstatus and a network folder where an HTML file/s are saved. Any high
school student can figure it out.

server head just the good old ptcstatus with a single line removed mod:
[image: Inline image 1]
files on server (most are just junk that we were working on for future
stuff):
[image: Inline image 2]

files on server shared folder (located anywhere you want) (count 2, the
HTML and our company logo gif)
[image: Inline image 3]

The database as you can see has grown after almost a year to 189,471kb (it
just got bigger right now) (again)
the server is my workstation and the network folder is some open space that
is available to everyone in the company

We made this because I got ticked off at not being able to tell our boss
that we needed more licenses. The graph showed us flatting out all the
time. Now you can see a nice curve that goes down at lunch time. Usually we
only show one single day.

the page looks like this:
[image: Inline image 5]

The red items are open licenses available. For the ones we have few of we
list each, for the intralink license we have a single red entry that says X
number available.

The code is simple, but would probably require like an hour or two to make
it work in someone else's machine/network/business. It was a nice intern
project that we probably need to re-write, but its so simple that we
haven't had a want/need. The users load via sql using a CSV table from
excel.

B

BenLoosli

23-Emerald III

Have you checked out the pricing for FLEXnet Manager?
I did about 10 years ago and it is very expensive. It has a base module and then you buy additional modules for each product that FLEXnet manages. We had Unigraphics, Pro/Engineer and Nastran and management decided that to have the software tell us we were out of licenses about once every 2 months was not worth the cost. We just modified the PTC Status tool to report on all 3 software packages. Nastran has switched to a different licensing scheme using tokens since that time.

Thank you,

Ben H. Loosli
USEC, INC.

P

proed

1-Visitor

Hi folks

I'm using CADminTools to monitor over 1000 people on various packages: Creo, Autocad, Solidworks, Inventor, etc, all with floating licenses via FlexLM... over 20 codes in all.

There's an old version of it somewhere open-source, but I stopped updating it years back... had thought about re-publishing it if there was interest.

Regards

Edwin

E

egifford

12-Amethyst

I've been using a tool called "License Monitor" written by Jason Ruprecht and made available online years ago. I'm monitoring about 8 different FlexLM issued pools of licenses with it and found it simple to set up and use. Unfortunatley, I'm not finding it online right now. I think it used to be on sourceforge. Although it simply logs the data in text files, it is pretty easy to pull these into Excel & Access to get great information out of the data. I graph the utilization of each license type (checked every 15 minutes)so I know when we should consider adding licenses and can track how many hours of use each user has of each license type throughout the year. Nothing like a line graph showing utilization pegged as justification to buy more licenses. Also very handy when the accounting office wants to know how they should charge the PTC maintenance bill to the various product groups using the software - generate a department based % utilization report with a nice pie chart.

For times when all licenses are in use I've created simple scripts that directly call the FlexLM service with command line functions. I have one for each of the key licenses types where we have asmall number. The user goes to a web pagewhere there is alink to the .bat file that calls FlexLM, they click on it and the window lists who has the license(s) in use. Quick call or email & they can arrange a handoff of the license.

Alfonso - that tool your intern developed looks pretty slick

A

amansfield

10-Marble

We use a perl script that I wrote about 10 years ago that strips the user, licenseand start and stop time information out of the log fileand then pushes the data into a MySQL database. We look at the results on some web pages using php's GD image library. All the graphics are generated on the fly. The images that it creates are a bit dated looking. I haven't played around with any of it for years: it's simple &just works..

It's not perfect but it gives us a consistent record of who uses what and when.

We originally started recording login times backin the early 90's when our company bought a bunch of SGI unix workstations each with a seat of Pro/Engineer for $30-40k a pop and our CEO wanted to make sure we were using them after spending all that cash (even wanted 2 shifts, which was impractical and thankfully was never enforced).

If anyone's interested in any of this, I'm happy to forward it along.

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