Duplicate login events

[joe_morton]

Has anyone else seen this issue?

Sporadically, the audit log shows a user logging in multiple times at the same timestamp. Normally this wouldn't matter, but if the user is assigned an ADU license and it's the first time they are logging in that day, they end up consuming multiple licenses for that day. I'd like to figure out what causes it and see if we can prevent it.

We are using Windchill 12.0.2.8

[buenosroas]

That is an interesting observation. I haven't caught this before, but knowing what to look for I saw we have such events in our system as well (12.0.2.5). Of our ADU licenses I checked logins for all users the past half year and saw that at the most two users shows to log in 6 times with the exact same timestamp and IP Address. For both users this happened on the very same day. I checked license usage for that day, but only one license was counted per user regardless of what the report tells me. Are you certain that your license usage is affected by this behaviour? Are your users getting denied login due to insufficient ADU licenses as a direct cause of this? 

When I run our license analyses I remove duplicate daily logins for the same user, so I didn't catch this before now. I'm only interested in seeing login data for unique users on a daily basis, cross checked with license types and then estimate an "activity ratio" (amount of days active divided by x months) to see if I should switch some users from named licenses over to ADU licenses and vice versa. It may not be perfect but it works.

[joe_morton]

Thanks for your reply. Some feedback on your questions:

Are you certain that your license usage is affected by this behaviour?

Yes. I've been tracking this for quite awhile. I developed my own reporting to basically see how many licenses "should" have been used and compare with how many licenses were used. It's taken some time to make sure my reporting is accurate, but now I'm consistently seeing the discrepancy explained by these duplicate login events.

Are your users getting denied login due to insufficient ADU licenses as a direct cause of this?

Thankfully not often as we generally have enough buffer in the ADU pools to handle a few extra occasional licenses, but it has happened a few times.

[buenosroas]

Thanks! I will investigate this as soon as I can, which unfortunately will have to be after the summer holidays when people are back in at work. Perhaps someone else have something to add to your question in the meantime. May I ask how you do the reporting for this? This is very interesting since I'm responsible for keeping up to date on our license usage, and I see that we some days are pretty close to our current ADU limit. One of those days was the one where those two users were reported to have logged in 6 times each.

[TomU]

@joe_morton,

You can see license allocation in the IndividualLicenseUsage table in the database.  I would be very surprised if the same user was being assigned more than one concurrent license (of the same type) within a single 24-hour period.  Filter where namedLicenses IS NULL and usageDate is today (or whatever day you're interested in.)  Login events get triggered a lot, but these shouldn't impact the number of licenses granted to a single user.

[joe_morton]

hi Tom,

Thanks for the reply. We didn't see a namedLicenses column. We searched with namedLicensesUsed set to NULL, but there weren't any results for that.

I actually have the scenario today where I see (from my reporting) 1 user who logged in using a View ADU, but Windchill shows 3 licenses used. In the IndividualLicenseUsage table, we saw 1 record for that user today. Is there a way for me to see in the database who those 2 other users supposedly are?

[TomU]

I wonder if maybe the columns have changed between Windchill versions.  This is from 12.1.2.2:

As far as tying these records to users, just join this table to the WTUser table.  Then you can display the matching username, last name, or full name.

IndividualLicenseUsage.idA3A4 = WTUser.idA2A2

[HelesicPetr]

Hi @joe_morton 

Go to the site - Utilities - Server Status - click to a Main Server Manager - search for Active Users - there should be a list of the users

Keep in mind that the user is counted by a IP address so if you and others use admin account from different IPs each IP is counted ...

also do not forget that visualization access is also counted

also you can use a  Security Audit Reporting where you can see IP addresses

PetrH