Monitoring Baan License Usage
How often do we run out of baan licenses? Is it on a daily basis or happens only during a particular time of the day, month or year? Which department occupies the most number of licenses? These were the questions we asked ourselves during the beginning of this year and to our surprise we could not answer any.
We run multiple Baan IV systems in our organisation and beginning of this year we reached a situation when we started to have odd occasions when users were being denied a baan login as there were no licenses left. Things started to become particularly bad during month ends when you have the entire accounts department logged into Baan, engineers catching up with their timesheet and in the process no licence is left for the despatch! As we started thinking about possibilities of buying few extra licenses it is then when we realised that we don’t have any way of measuring our actual license usage. Apart from odd emails from users unable to log on there were no evidences to support our claim for additional licenses!
Once we realised the importance of monitoring our Baan license usage we developed a system using a combination of Microsoft SQL Server Integration services and SQL reporting services which successfully helped us in quantifying our license usage and more importantly it enabled us to derive trends which clearly pointed towards a switch from Licence Daemon to SLM. Eventually we did make the switch and currently we are making the most of working in different time zones. Today we are fine for the next few years without any extra license unless we see radical growth and continue to have the monitoring system running having been realised the importance of it.
Technical Overview
SSIS Job pings the license daemon on each of the baan servers through command line at regular intervals >>> Output is saved into SQL table >>> SSRS report summarises the information and presents the same in the form of graphs and drill downs.
Post SLM the system was adjusted to consume XML data(unlike lic daemon) churned out by SLM.
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