Scope
OpenLM’s main Administrative interface, the EasyAdmin web application, enables administrators to manually retrieve licenses via designated action buttons on the “Active Products” window. This option has proven to be very useful, however it seemed to have raised certain inquiries by customers. This document sums up the properties and limitations of the system’s license removal capabilities.
The “Active Products” window
The “Active Products” window displays data about licenses that are used at the current time.
Each line of the display represents a user who is momentarily using a specific license. It shows specific details about the software session such as start time and duration. Some of the information presented in this window originates in the OpenLM Agent module, so a proper installation of the OpenLM Agent (Active Agent or Utilizer Agent) on each client workstation is a prerequisite to obtaining this data.
With the “Active Products” window, administrators can monitor individual workstations that run licensed applications. They can detect idle applications, and shut down such applications with a mouse click. In order to retrieve licenses and shut down applications, an OpenLM Active Agent module must be installed on each client workstation.
User Idle
If the user has not been actively using the license, the idle time period would be shown in the “User Idle” column. This information is sampled by OpenLM Agent modules (Active Agent or Utilizer Agent) on each client workstation, and sent to the OpenLM server. The sample period is set by the Agent policy’s “Agent report” period, as in the example below (set to 60 sec).
Removing licenses
Administrators have the option to manually remove a license from a specified workstation. This is done by highlighting the user row on the Active Products window and clicking the “Remove License” icon (See image below).
There are several constraints that are specific to this feature:
- The end user must have been inactive for a minimum period of time in order for his license to be retrieved.
- If the license is not really associated with any real product activity on the specified workstation (as happens when a license gets artificially “frozen” on a computer), then the license will be freed and will be returned to the pool of available licenses.
- If the worker is actually using the product, then re-obtaining a license would be automatically attempted. If this happens the license for that product and workstation will re-appear on the active products screen, with a new handle number.
- Retrieval of licenses may only be accomplished once a minimal period of time has elapsed since the license was checked out. This value is set by default to 5 minutes in compliance with FLEXlm license manager’s limitations.
Closing applications
In order to actively close an application on the workstation, an administrator should highlight the relevant row, and click the Close Application icon (See image below).
This operation will retrieve the license back to the license pool, save the open project, and the application itself will be shut down.
There are some constraints that are specific to this feature:
- It requires a proper installation of the OpenLM Active Agent module.
- It works only extension-based active agents. At the time of writing this revision (Rev 1.1), these include Matlab, ArcGIS and AutoCAD.
Common Constraints
There are several constraints that are common to both the License Removal and Application Closure features.These are as follows:
- At the time of writing this revision (Rev 1.0), These features are only available when working with the FLEXlm license manager.
- An OpenLM Agent module must be properly installed on each Client workstation. The Application closing feature requires the Active Agent. The License Removal feature may use either the Active Agent or the Utilizer Agent.
- Borrowed licenses (AKA Linger licenses) may not be retrieved via the EasyAdmin application.
