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Floating Desktop Licence Monitoring Tool

  • January 16, 2020
  • 6 replies
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arnold_bijlsma
Enthusiast
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Does anyone have a decent and free FME Desktop licence monitoring tool? At the moment, I have very little visibility how much of our licence we're using on a daily basis, and whether we're short of licences some of the time or more regularly.

Two options I have tried, neither of which is ideal:

  1. Using the logfile on the licence server. This gives all the logins and logouts, and I assume even the attempts. But I don't have direct access to this file, so I need my IT department to send it to me on a regular basis. Plus, the first few lines of the logfile clearly state that it's not recommended for usage monitoring.
  2. The second option is described in https://docs.safe.com/fme/html/FME_Desktop_Documentation/FME_Desktop_Admin_Guide/FMEInstallation/Monitoring_Floating_License_Use.htm , where you set up a lmutil command. This I can put in a batch file, which I can run at regular intervals, and then spits out a time-stamped text file. It kind of works, but as it's on my machine, it only works when I am logged in. And IT are not happy about me installing the batch file on the server.

Are there any lmutil based tools out there that I can use to monitor/track licence usage? Has anybody created anything that they'd be happy to share? Any other ideas how I could monitor my floating licences?

6 replies

sigtill
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  • sigtillSupporter
  • Supporter
  • January 16, 2020

Hi @arnold_bijlsma

Can the LicenseChecker transformer be used?

 

 

The real SigTill
redgeographics
Celebrity
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I've been thinking about something like that as well, but the downside of @sigtill's suggestion is that you need to run FME (and check out a license) in order to run the LicenseChecker, which would skew the results.

FlexLM comes with some command line tools, including one to show the license status (lmtools lmstat, see this page). If you set up a scheduled task in Windows to run that at a regular interval and output (append) the results to a text file you can then at a later stage process that with FME and produce a report.

Digging deep into my MS Dos memory, adding this to the end of the command line should do the trick:

>> floatinglicense.log

So the full command line would be 

lmtools lmstat -a -c [license file] >> floatinglicense.log

But note I don't have a floating license setup here that I can test it with...

arnold_bijlsma
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  • arnold_bijlsmaEnthusiast
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  • January 16, 2020
redgeographics wrote:

I've been thinking about something like that as well, but the downside of @sigtill's suggestion is that you need to run FME (and check out a license) in order to run the LicenseChecker, which would skew the results.

FlexLM comes with some command line tools, including one to show the license status (lmtools lmstat, see this page). If you set up a scheduled task in Windows to run that at a regular interval and output (append) the results to a text file you can then at a later stage process that with FME and produce a report.

Digging deep into my MS Dos memory, adding this to the end of the command line should do the trick:

>> floatinglicense.log

So the full command line would be 

lmtools lmstat -a -c [license file] >> floatinglicense.log

But note I don't have a floating license setup here that I can test it with...

That's what I have done so far, and is described in my second option. I got the lmtools command running, creating a time-stamped logfile, saved it as a batch file, and then set up a Windows Task Schedule to run it every 15 minutes after login.

Apart from some Windows issue with the Task Scheduler, it does kind of work. However, it only runs when I am logged in (i.e. Tue-Fri 9am-5pm). And IT is not happy me moving that batch file that runs every 15 minutes to a corporate server.

And it still feels very much like a Blue Peter solution (houtje-touwtje oplossing). Given that our ArcGIS license server used to work on lmtools as well, I would hope someone has something a bit more elegant (he said with his fingers crossed...) than fiddling about with 90s DOS commands ;-)

 

 

redgeographics
Celebrity
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arnold_bijlsma wrote:

That's what I have done so far, and is described in my second option. I got the lmtools command running, creating a time-stamped logfile, saved it as a batch file, and then set up a Windows Task Schedule to run it every 15 minutes after login.

Apart from some Windows issue with the Task Scheduler, it does kind of work. However, it only runs when I am logged in (i.e. Tue-Fri 9am-5pm). And IT is not happy me moving that batch file that runs every 15 minutes to a corporate server.

And it still feels very much like a Blue Peter solution (houtje-touwtje oplossing). Given that our ArcGIS license server used to work on lmtools as well, I would hope someone has something a bit more elegant (he said with his fingers crossed...) than fiddling about with 90s DOS commands ;-)

 

 

90s DOS commands for the win!! (My first computer had MS-DOS 3.21, on 5.25" floppy disks)

But yeah, it is a bit of a Blue Peter / houtje-touwtje solution. I've done a bit of googling and found some hits here but there's no telling whether or not those solutions do exactly the same thing but wrapped in a shiny interface and whether or not your IT department is going to like it. OpenLM does seem to have an ArcGIS-specific version though, so that might come in useful.

jdh
Contributor
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  • jdhContributor
  • Contributor
  • January 16, 2020

I go the lmutil lmstat command route.

 

 

There are several commercial license monitoring tools, in a lot of cases these are overkill, and it some cases cost more than an FME license.

https://www.openlm.com/

https://www.flexera.com/products/spend-optimization/software-asset-management.html

https://www.x-formation.com/license-statistics/

http://www.sassafras.com/

http://softwaremetering.com/_metering.htm

 

ferhdfme
Contributor
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  • ferhdfmeContributor
  • Contributor
  • February 12, 2025

Using the FlexNet floating license server, you can check how many licenses are being used and which user is consuming them.

  1. Open LMTools.
  2. From the Server Status window, click on Perform Status Enquiry.

 

Keep calm and automate with FME
warrendev
j.botterill
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