So you are tasked with managing multiple FLEXlm based software license managers, but you want more than a dump of the current license information into a text file or in some horribly written and truly user-unfriendly Windows GUI. Then I have a couple of web based open source products for you, and while the installs are not the easiest they do offer some great insight into your license usage.

Managing Your License Servers

The first product is phpLicenseWatcher. It presents in a nice web interface all of the information that the command line as well as Windows GUI tool provides, and then some. Quoting from their website:

• Shows the health of a license server or a group of them
• Check which licenses are being used and who is currently using them
• Get a listing of licenses, their expiration dates and number of days to expiration
• E-mail alert of licenses that will expire within certain time period (i.e. within next 10 days)
• Monitors license utilization

One of the biggest advantages of the product is that it allows you to monitor and manage multiple servers at once. It even includes the ability to graph your license use, but instead I would recommend the following:

Graphing Your FLEXlm License Usage

As you know I’m a great fan of the Cacti graphing system. Well thanks to the work of a user named pvenezia on their forums, he developed a fantastic template and script for graphing FLEXlm usage. The script allows you to monitor multiple license servers and graph the usage of every application on those servers.

What makes the Cacti based graphs of the FLEXlm servers so nice is that you can combine the data from multiple servers to give you an overall picture of your license use. For example we have multiple FLEXlm servers in different offices handling our AutoCAD use. Following graph shows an example of how I’ve combined the usage data from the multiple servers to show how each office is the licenses (note this is a custom graph create from the data from the referenced script and template).

I highly recommend these two open source solutions for helping you to monitor and manage your FLEXLm license servers and their associated products. It will help you to control your costs (i.e. knowing if you have too many licenses) and better manage who is using your software.