Monitoring License usage

[GRF]

We have 5 network licenses and 5 engineers who are daily users. We also have 4 partial users, 2-3 times a month. In the near future we will be adding 1 maybe 2 dedicated FEA machines. Ideally we would have more license than we do. I would like to be able to build a case to purchase more licenses.

I was thinking of monitory the network license usage and creating some sort of report showing # times we ran out. Does anyone know of a way to create a report or log file to monitor the license activity? I am getting some feed back from my VAR as well and will update this posting as I do.

Thanks for your time,
GRF

 

[JMirisola]

From the knowledge base:

The SolidWorks Network License Manager does not provide usage statistics of the licensed products; however, it is possible to enable a report log from the vendor daemon that reports usage information. Please see Appendix F 'The Report Log File' of the FlexLM Users Guide for more information about setting up the Report Log.

http://www.solidworks.com/pages/services/servicepacks.html?CFID=11228751&CFTOKEN=66312887

The report log created by the vendor daemon requires software from Macrovision in order to extract the data from the log file. See Macrovision's website for purchasing information of the log software.

An alternative to using the Macrovision software would be to create a macro to parse the Solid Network License(SNL) log file, which contains user, machine, feature and time stamp information, in order to generate a usage report.

Jeff Mirisola, CSWP
Certified DriveWorks AE

http://designsmarter.typepad.com/jeffs_blog

Dell M90, Core2 Duo
4GB RAM
Nvidia 3500M

 

[looslib]

The Macrovision software for license monitoring is VERY expenseive. I use a couple of lines in a batch file that runs every hour to extract a snapshot of my current license uasge. It is based on code from a Pro/E admin in England. The code is available at:

http://www.cadmin.co.uk.

Look in the CADmin Tools section for license tracking program.

"Wildfires are dangerous, hard to control, and economically catastrophic."

Ben Loosli

 

[bassmanjax]

We did the same as Ben and used some home grown coding to monitor our SW % ABAQUS licenses. We did find this though;

http://www.openlm.com/

Looks useful, and a LOT cheaper than the Macrovision solution

Regards

Martin Stokes CEng MIMechE

 

[GRF]

Thank you for all the suggestions.

Jeff's answer is exactly word for word what I got back from my VAR. Solution ID S-03133 from the SW Knoledgebase.

I am going to give Ben's solution a try. Especially since I do not work for IT and managing the SW stuff is supposed to only be a small % of my time. We are in a cost reduction mode so purchasing a solution is not an option.