Adding software consumption data
Use the Licenses application to manually add consumption data records to the database. Software consumption data is information pertinent to measuring a software product's usage. This task provides a way to manually create and save that data for later evaluation.
About this task
You can manually create a consumption data record and then enter your consumption data for use later in a manual audit. A manual audit is one that is done by someone performing manual calculations using (or consuming) the entered consumption data, rather than, for example, an audit done automatically whenever data is imported from a discovery or inventory tool. The consumption data record can apply to a specific installed instance (by completing the Deployed Software field) or to the software product in general, no matter where it is installed (by completing the Software Name field).
Consumption refers to the usage of a resource; in this case, software. Software consumption can be measured in many ways, including peak usage or total number of capacity units consumed over time. This software usage, measured in capacity units, can be counted separately or aggregated, depending on the software license entitlement. Software consumption does not have to be measured at the same time for all computers associated with the licensed software.
A resource can be many things, particularly if your software product is licensed with a resource value unit (RVU) capacity type. In this case the product's resource units can be anything from the number of goods manufactured to the number of sales orders written. An RVU is a way of tying a software license entitlement to the amount of whatever resource is managed by the product.
For example, a business might license its procurement software product based on the number of purchase orders that a customer creates using it. So the license entitlement might have a resource quantity of 10,000 (the capacity would be the resource quantity equivalent in RVU), with purchase order as the resource unit (and RVU as the capacity unit). Thus a customer could use the procurement software to manage up to 10,000 purchase orders before exceeding the entitled capacity (specified in RVU).
The source of the software consumption data can be a discovery tool such as IBM® Tivoli® Asset Discovery for Distributed (importing data from IBM Tivoli Software Knowledge Base Toolkit), a user (if the data was entered manually), a system management tool, or some other means. If the source is a tool like Asset Discovery for Distributed, the Source field will be prefilled for you after you enter the software product information. Otherwise the field is read-only.
In some cases, consumption data records for conversion variants are not displayed. If software products B and A each have consumption data records and are installed on the same computer or partition, and B becomes a variant of A, then only the consumption data record for A is displayed in the user interface.
Only consumption data records that are added manually can be modified or deleted.
Start or end dates cannot be in the future, nor can they overlap in any way with the date range of another consumption data record, if that record is for the same software product, on the same computer or partition, with the same capacity unit and subcapacity values.
The steps for adding software consumption data follow.