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NI VLM 3.1 Feature Preview – Reporting

NI Volume License Manager 3.1 will be releasing Summer 2013 with a beta program to occur in May 2013. The new version contains many exciting features, some of which we will preview through the month of April. Please contact the author if you are interested in joining the beta program and putting these new features to work at your company soon.

As a volume license administrator, you have many things to worry about. From the day-to-day of assigning licenses and managing media to the bigger tasks like budgeting and making sure that you have the right licenses in your agreement so that every engineer has the tools they need, there is a lot to think about.

NI Volume License Manager is going to help you out with those big questions with the most-requested feature: reporting. NI VLM 3.1 implements an entirely new logging structure on the backend that enables a rich reporting UI for you on the front end. Seven different reports will help you answer the many questions, including the following:

  • Who is actively using their license seats and whose seats can be reassigned?
  • How many license seats have I used or overdrafted for my renewal? Do I need to change my number of seats?
  • How many checkout denials are happening for my concurrent licenses? Do I need to change my number of seats?
  • How do I bill different departments in my company for their license usage?

Let's take that last question as an example. It's one of the toughest things for an administrator to answer, especially when license usage is split across different cost centers or departments, even within the day, due to usage of concurrency or engineers working on multiple projects. Here's an example of what you could see in the License Allocation report:

Reporting.png

This report shows the number of seats assigned over time for non-concurrent licenses aggregated by the 'Department' custom field. For example, if you were trying to bill the Testers group for their share of the cost of LabVIEW Base over the past year, you can see that they owe 31% of the cost. You can adjust any report to work over any time period that begins after you installed NI VLM 3.1.

As a bonus, here's one more report that will be among the seven included. This one is called Seat Utilization. As you can see, this shows the number of seats that were used for the TestStand Development System Computer-Based license. The blue section shows seats granted and the red line shows the number of seats available in the agreement. You can see that this report will help you to determine if you have the right number of seats in your agreement. If you have overdraft enabled, you will also be able to see generated overdrafts in the table below the chart as well.

ReportingFeaturePreview2.png

Stephen Meserve
National Instruments
Contributors