For the customers planning upgrade to Windchill 11.1 and above (Windchill Licensing)

[Arpit-Singh]

• Windchill License Usage Reporting Utility should be used to identifying License Usage Requirements prior to upgrading.
  • Download Link

• ** Pre-requisite **:
  • All the security audit events should be turned on, few months before using the Windchill License Usage Reporting Utility.
  • See CS208355 for more information.

• Features:
  • Only a Site Administrators will have ability to run this utility.
  • Perform an audit of license usage
  • Map users to specific license group
  • Plan purchase of licenses
  • Ensure license compliance

[TomU]

Curious if anyone else has run this utility and if the results seem accurate.

I've run it twice, once for each license model, and I'm not finding the results very useful.  Many users are missing from the report and the same users are shown consuming different licenses depending on the license model it's run under.  This does not reflect reality in our company where the CAD users are consuming PDMLink (module) licenses and almost everyone else is consuming View/Print Only (navigate) licenses.  Either the tool isn't capable of making that distinction or I'm not running it correctly...

[JHall]

So far I've really seriously struggled with PTC and this reporting requirement.  It has been a real (a REAL) hassle to get them to start the reporting process in preparation for next June when we want to upgrade to 11.1. 

As to the reports results, so far very disappointing and not useful.  I'm hoping the next report is better.

James

Windchill 11.0 M030 CPS16

[MikeLockwood]

I read the CS carefully - it says ambiguously to enable "all" the security audit events without really identifying.  Dangerous to enable all.  Created a tech support case - went round and round trying to determine exactly what to enable in configAudit.xml.  Still don't know. Would appreciate anyone posting their configAudit.xml file with comments about which directly relate to the report.

thanks

[TomU]

CS208335 is confusing (at least Method 1 is) because there are multiple sections in the XML file that match the section being referred to:  <ConfigEntry class="" enabled="false">.

There are five different sections that match this string in my XML file, but the article makes it sound like there should only be one.  In my case I only changed the first section, the one dealing with logins, to "true".  Who knows, maybe that's why my report is wonky.

[Arpit-Singh]

Great feedback and your assumption about the report is also correct.

In CS208355 all the entries like > 

<ConfigEntry class="" enabled="false">  

should be change to 

<ConfigEntry class="" enabled="true">

[TomU]

I see someone changed the article to now say "all"...  😉

[Arpit-Singh]

Yes, thanks for the feedback. We continue to improve the quality of our articles based on customer feedback.

[Arpit-Singh]

The recommendation is really to enable all, however you also have a valid point as enabling all the for a long duration will increase the DB Table Size and you may need to purge them. Hence in that context its better to enable all audit events for a specific period (ex: 3-6 months), for which you are confident that it will capture activities of all the users. This duration should be based on individuals judgement and can be less than 3 months.

And then the Usage Assessment Tool should be also run for that same duration to get a high quality report which will help you find the User License Entitlements.

Hope this helps.