License compliance

The License Compliance system operates automatically using default parameters that are appropriate in many cases. This facility does not restrict your use of the system and does not affect system performance. Do not create or update the Data-Admin-License or Data-Admin-System facilities except as advised by Pegasystems Global Customer Support.

Overview

The License Compliance facility provides a flexible framework for collecting usage data that in summary can provide evidence about past usage of a production Pega Platform 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 Pega Platform 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, occasional user, sporadic user, and invocation 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, occasional, and sporadic, 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 who logs on 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 the Pega Platform 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.

Reports and compliance monitoring

To view summary statistics at the period level (typically a month), select one of the four options within the Configure > System > License menu in Dev Studio.

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 to each record) for reporting purposes.