Managing licenses

System administrators need to track IBM® Cognos® Analytics license usage.

The license information in IBM Cognos Analytics shows the licenses that were used by individual users with their last login. Users' changed capabilities are not reflected in their licence usage until the users log in again. Also, for existing customers the license usage information is incomplete until all users log in again.

A license usage report is generated when the licenses page in Manage > Licenses is opened for the first time, when the Refresh button is clicked, or after a product restart.

The basic report contains information about license usage by user. Some customers might want to do additional reporting, for example, on license usage by tenant.

IBM Cognos Analytics has a few types of licensed roles, each of them associated with different capabilities. Refer to this article (www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21684890) to view the capabilities and permissions matrix that the IBM Cognos Analytics license model is based on.

License usage can be monitored in a production and non-production environment. For more information about these two types of environments, see Enabling a production environment.

Procedure

  1. To access the licenses page in IBM Cognos Analytics, click Manage > Licenses.
  2. To enter the number of owned licenses, click the Owned field for the licensed role, type the number, and click Apply to save the value.

    This value is used for information purposes only and is not included in the license usage report.

  3. To generate the license usage report, click Refresh.

    You can generate the report as often as you want.

  4. To view the license information for a specific role, click the details icon Details icon.

    This information is a subset of information from the full report.

  5. To view the full report, click Export to save the information to a CSV file, and open the file.
    Tip: In the exported file, the values in Level column correspond to specific license roles, as follows:
    Level License role
    3 Analytics Administrator
    2 Analytics Explorer
    1 Analytics User
    0 Information Distribution
    -1 The license role is unknown because the user has not logged in yet.

What to do next

For more information, see the following topics: