how to view usage on a license server by user

There are really two thing you want to track. The number of concurrent licenses in use during the day. And then the folks that startup Creo every day. Those are two very different numbers.

Rather than buying software to do this I suggest a roll your own approach.

Tracking Licenses

I suggest you read my presentation from 2014 PTC Live Global. Attached, tracking starts on page 23, but you need to understand the stuff before that page.

What I intended to say on each slide can be found by clicking on the icon in the upper left corner of the pdf.

We have it email us the results of the day every night:

Getting the number of users that access the software each day

As for tracking users I have this line in my startup script.

start C:\ptc\startup_scripts\start-user-tracking.vbs

The virtual basic is just a wrapper for a batch file so the user doesn’t see a new command window pop up when they start Creo.

This is the batch script (see attached. You’ll need to replace your server name and share name.

The following is from an internal email:

I’ve been wanting to get the number of unique users that start up Creo Parametric each day.

This is a different number than the number of concurrent licenses used.

For example this is the number of unique users that started up Creo 4 last week, vs the number of concurrent licenses used up.

Tuesday was our Go-Live day for Creo 4, so we had a lot of folks installing and firing up the software.

I created this graph by manually massaging the data files in Excel. You will notice later that on day one, my scripts will give a different number.

The reason for this difference is in Excel I eliminated duplicate of the users, if they started Creo on multiple machines I only counted them once.

In the scripts below I’m not doing that. If they startup Creo on multiple machines I count each one.  

Attached are four text files. Save these out and change the extension to .bat

• BatchSubstitute.txt
• Get-counts.txt
• Uniq.txt
• Daily-usage-tracking.txt

You’ll need to edit the last script for your own environment. Server name, share name, and paths.

The Creo Startup Script

The process starts in the Creo startup script where I have these two lines near the top of the script.

rem ** Gather daily-usage data

start L:\scripts\startup\%CREOSHORTVER%\daily-usage-tracking.bat

This script outputs a file with content like this: giving the user name and machine name.

Daily User Count for Tue 01/28/2020

Username,MachineName

The numbers in front of the filename are the year, month, & day

In the script, that date is set by this command:

set TODAY=20%date:~-2%%date:~4,2%%date:~7,2%

Add batch files to the output folder

In the output folder, you’ll get a collection of text files like this.

Place the other three batch files in this folder.

Getting the user count

Double clicking on the get-counts.bat will output full-count.txt file.

The yellow column is the date, the blue column are the number of users.

Excel Manipulation

Import the full-count.txt file into Excel. Use the colon as the delimiter.

You should get this:

We need to convert column A into a date:

• Select Column A by picking on the A at the head of the column
• In Excel pick the Data ribbon, and then pick Text to Columns

• Pick the Next button twice until you get to step 3.
• Pick the Date radio button and use the pull down to select YMD, then pick Finish

• Now you can make a pretty graph to impress folks with….

• But….  if you add in the number of licenses used on those days you have a really useful tool to show you how much head room you have in your license pool
• 

If you want, you could set up a scheduled task to generate the full-count.txt file every night.

Enjoy!

The scripts are in the zip file with the extension .txt. change them to .bat to use.