Working with the License Compliance facility

The License Compliance facility provides a flexible framework for collecting usage data that in summary can provide evidence about past usage of a production PRPC system. A background process known as the License daemon logs statistics each hour, which are automatically summarized at the start of each day, and further summarized for a month, quarter, or other period. Standard reports are available for each level.

In a clustered, multinode PRPC system, the facility reports on consolidated usage across all nodes. The number of nodes, or the power of each server node does not affect the data. You can add, remove, start, or stop nodes with no affect on compliance.

Unlike license facilities in some software, this feature does not act as a key or trigger that enables or disables features of the system. Its primary purpose is to assist you in providing statistical evidence of compliance. Setting this feature up incorrectly — or even failing to set it up at all — does not disable, limit, or alter other operations of your system.

How use of your system is classified for license compliance reporting is in most cases an important factor. For example, it is important to understand how the terms regular user, invocation, and occasional user are defined for your company, and to make the settings in your system match the terms of your license agreement. These affect peak counts during a measurement period, typically a calendar month).

Use is classified by characteristics of authenticated requestors, in two broad groups:

• Human users who complete business operations using the system, as Named users.
• Processing performed through service calls, plus processing performed by Web users (typically through the Directed Web access feature, classified as Invocation users.

The precise definition of these and related terms depends on your own license agreement. However, using the default definitions, Named users are subdivided into regular and occasional where a regular user is logged in and using the system to accomplish work during at least 4 one-hour intervals for at least one day during the measurement period.

These designations apply only to a specific period; a user may be a regular user during one month and an occasional user in other months. (In addition, anyone who can update rules and logs on at all during the measurement period — determined by the Allow rule check out? box on the Security tab of the Operator ID form — or who has created, modified or deleted a rule during the period may be counted as one regular user, if so specified in the contract license terms.)

Similarly, invocations are divided into Web users — who use Directed Web access or access PRPC only through services such as portlets — and system-based users. Each completed interaction or service request that performs processing work (as defined) counts as an invocation. Queries and read-only processing typically do not count as invocations.

These input elements control the operation of this facility:

• A license compliance data instance (Data-Admin-License), referenced in the System instance (Data-Admin-System).
• Settings in operator ID data instances
• Optionally, application settings which exclude certain activities or service operations from counting as invocations

1. Creating the License data instance

Using information supplied by Pegasystems, complete a License Compliance data instance. The data you enter on the Import tab is copied to the Summary and License tabs when you save the form. For details on this form, see About License Compliance data instances.

For testing purposes, you can create more than one License Compliance data instance, but only one is in force.

2. Activation

To activate a license compliance data instance:

1. Open the System instance (Data-Admin-System)
2. Enter the key of the data instance in the License parameters name field.
3. Save the form.
4. Stop and restart the system. Data collection by the license daemon begins in accord with the parameters in the License Compliance data instance.

If the License Compliance facility is enabled but the License parameters name field is blank or references a non-existent License Compliance data instance, data collection occurs using default parameters.

3. Setting Operator ID values

For each Operator ID instance, the value of the License Type field (on the Security tab) may have a significant affect on data collection and to Named or Invocation as appropriate. Review and set this field carefully, for each Operator ID instance is use. Generally, choose:

• Named for Operator IDs that correspond to human users who access the system through a browser session.
• Invocation for Operator IDs that are used by agents, services, other background processes, human users who access the system only through services, and external users (Directed Web Access).

To view summary statistics at the period level — typically a month — Select one of the four menu options within the > System >Tools > Usage Metrics menu on the Designer Studio.

In addition, these standard list view reports are also available to summarize the data produced by this facility

• Log-License-Usage-Hourly.List.ALL — Hourly data since midnight GMT.
• Log-License-Usage-Daily.List.ALL — Daily data since the start of this period.
• Log-License-Usage-Period.List.ALL — Details for completed period.
• Log-License-Usage-Period.UsagebyHourDayWeek.ALL
• Log-License-Usage-Period.UsageforStandardBilling.ALL — Shows all months of data available.

You can use the List View and Summary View forms to create additional reports as desired. (The Report wizard does not directly support reports on Log- classes.)

To facilitate reporting, all properties in the log_daily_usage, log_hourly_usage and log_usage_summary tables are exposed as distinct database columns; these tables have no Storage Stream (blob) column. As these tables do not have a standard pzInsKey column, copy and modify one of the standard list view rules above as a starting point. You can also use third-party reporting tools with these tables.

Throughout the License Compliance facility, users are identified by Operator ID. Through settings on the License Compliance form, you can specify additional facts about a user (through properties added each record) for reporting purposes.

When this facility is enabled, a License Daemon starts each time you start the server. Periodically, such as once an hour this daemon saves counts and totals into instances of the Log-License-Usage-Hourly class, corresponding to the log_hourly_usage table. This table typically contains one row per active user for each hourly snapshot.

After midnight GMT time, a stored procedure in the PegaRULES database summarizes hourly data, creating instances of the log_daily_usage table (corresponding to the Log-License-Usage-Daily class). The log_hourly_usage details for the prior day may be purged. The log_daily_usage table contains one row per active user for each day in the currently open period.

A second daily stored procedure in the PegaRULES database summarizes daily data into the log_usage_summary table, which corresponds to the Log-License-Usage-Summary class. The details of this roll-up are affected by settings in current License Compliance data instance. After a period is complete, the log_daily_usage details for the prior periods may purged.

The pr_license_parameters table contains license details needed by the stored procedures. These values are set automatically at startup.