License monitoring tool
Rating: 9 out of 10
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We had ineffective management of Software licenses, resulting in waste of funds and effort in ITS and within the Business. We wanted new online processes to increase efficiency and enable data driven decision-making. We can forecast exact requirements for software licenses and get the most usage from the concurrent license pool.
Pros
- Peak concurrent license use for any period of time, often less than expected, saves unnecessary over purchase.
- Denials of license, can quickly see where a license is not working, say, after an upgrade.
- Comparison of license utilisation (% when near the limit).
- Quick check of expiring licenses.
Cons
- You can share a link to a dynamic report (e.g. the last 365 days). The URL is very long but it can be used with a 3rd party short URL utility and shared with users.
- Upgrading to the latest version took a long time to troubleshoot, which left a short gap in the saved data.
Likelihood to Recommend
OpenLM can simplify the reporting of complex licenses with multiple toolboxes or products on one server.
It covers most of our license server types, but not all.
The academic version is reasonably priced (e.g. for educational institutions) giving 90% of the features, however setting it up on-premise was more complex than our original pilot would suggest. We couldn't do without it now.
Vetted Review
6 years of experience