License monitoring

I was just looking through the log file and noticed that license denials are logged. It would be pretty simple to write a script to extract that information from the file and create a report.

e.g.

14:13:43 (ptc_d) DENIED: "PROE_Flex3C" user@their_pc (Licensed number of users already reached. (-4,342))

Also I had forgotten about the "ptcreport.log" file which is also stored in the licensing folder: this file stays intact if the server is relaunched, so I would assume that it keeps a running total of license data. It is encrypted or in a non-readable binary format so I presume that the commercial tools read this file.

In Reply to alfonso medina:

That's pretty cool. I think denials are the No. 1 data you want if you need
to get more. You always get asked "well how many more?" Denial counting
gets you some clues as to how many more.

Actually while we are on this subject and since someone else mentioned
already... See we have this dumb idea that our ideal ratio is 2.9 users per
license. Well it seems to work for us, but then some guys from another
company gave us a presentation on some unrelated software and made mention
of the license settings. They say that if you set the time out to 5 minutes
or less, that your license availability becomes excellent, more than
doubling our current ratio.

That made sense to me because I know for example I can get busy or go to a
short meeting while using up a pro/e license that will stay with my
computer for half an hour. The other users will probably have similar
situations. Most of our engineers only go home to say hi to the kids and
see if the wife is still there. Otherwise they have their nose stuck in the
small crevices left open in what used to be walkable space in the labs. So
the little time they spend on pro/e, should be a blessing to the rest of us
cad monkeys who only know to extrude first and ask questions later. So does
setting that time out to 5 minutes work? Do you guys do this or similar at
your different companies?

Can we get a poll of how many minutes you guys have set your time out to. I
would be really interested, I think its always an eye opener when others do
things completely different and it works better.

A while back I started working on a license monitoring tool in my spare time (ha! what's that?). It is still an incomplete project, but I was working on a few regular expressions to pull out the relevant data from the log file and from an lmutil file. I cannot find the one for the log file at the moment, so it is probably burried deep in an old folder in a random text file, but here is the one I could find for the lmutil (what ptcstatus runs) file.

\b\w+?\b\s\b\w+?\b\s(?<license>\w+?)\:\s+?\(.+?(?<total>\d+)\s.+?;\s+?.+?(?<used>\d+)\s.+

This generates an array of structs containing the name of the license, total licenses available, and total in use. If you only want to look at one license (say, PROE_Flex3C), then add the first part of the name (enough to make it unique) between the closing angle bracket of license and the \w:

\b\w+?\b\s\b\w+?\b\s(?<license>PROE_Fl\w+?)\:\s+?\(.+?(?<total>\d+)\s.+?;\s+?.+?(?<used>\d+)\s.+

And here is the one I used for sorting individual user informations:

\s+(?<user>\w+)\s(?<computer>\S+\s)\S+\s\(.*\)\s\((?<server>\S+)\/(?<port>\d+)\s+(?<id>\d+).+start\s\w+\s(?<date_time>.+)

I'm just a mech. E. and I am still teaching myself how to write these. If someone else has a better reg. ex., I'd love to see it.

-Lawrence

Thank you for all the responses. Since I do not know any of the pearl or sql, etc languages, andI doubt my company will spend the money for a license monitoring program,I will have to stick with my batch file I wrote to utilize the ptcstatus command. It doesn't get the license denial information but what we have is enough. Barely...

Steve Galayda