Enable usage reporting

Overview on usage reporting

Customers have the option to enable software usage reporting to track software consumption across a hybrid cloud environment. The usage may consist of both license usage as well as adoption usage. License usage data is shown on the Current usage page.

The following technologies are able to gather and report usage data to IBM Software Central:

  • IBM Metrics Operator — reports usage on products that store metrics in Prometheus.
  • IBM License Service — reports license usage for IBM products deployed on OpenShift and requires IBM Metrics operator to send usage data to IBM Software Central.
  • IBM License Metric Tool — reports license usage for products that are deployed to environments other than OpenShift or Kubernetes, including virtual machines, selected public clouds, logical partitions, and physical computers.
  • IBM Data Reporter Operator — gathers license usage for selected IBM products, but primarily gathers adoption usage data. Prerequisites IBM Metrics Operator.

Your product may instruct you to install one or many of these technologies.

Enabling license usage reporting for IBM products deployed on Red Hat OpenShift

To report license usage for IBM products deployed on Red Hat OpenShift to IBM Software Central, both IBM License Service and IBM Metrics Operator need to be installed on each cluster from which license usage data needs to be reported.

IBM License Service tracks license usage for all IBM Products deployed on OpenShift, which are licensed based on Virtual Processor Core (VPC) and Processor Value Unit (PVU) metrics. It also has capability to gather usage data for other license metrics from deployed products via dedicated APIs. IBM License Service uses IBM Metrics Operator to send the gathered license usage data to IBM Software Central.

Data sent to IBM Software Central

License and usage data are collected from the OpenShift cluster Prometheus instance. Details of the data and format are described in the metering API documentation.

Procedure

  1. Install IBM Metrics Operator

    • Configure one of the following storage provisioning options for IBM Metrics Operator

    • Enable Openshift User Workload Monitoring on your cluster

    • Create or get your pull secret

      • On the main menu, click your user name, click My Account, click Pull secrets, and then click Create pull secret
      • On the Pull secret name box, enter a unique name for your pull secret
      • To get your pull secret, on the Your pull secret box, click the Copy button (copy icon)
      • Click Save.

    • Install the IBM Metrics Operator from your OpenShift cluster OperatorHub from the Certified Operators catalog

    • Create a Kubernetes secret in the installed namespace with the name redhat-marketplace-pull-secret and key PULL_SECRET with the value of the pull secret

    oc create secret generic redhat-marketplace-pull-secret -n redhat-marketplace --from-literal=PULL_SECRET=${PULL_SECRET}
    oc patch marketplaceconfig marketplaceconfig -n redhat-marketplace --type='merge' -p '{"spec": {"license": {"accept": true}}}'

  2. Install IBM License Service Operator

    IBM License Service should be installed as part of your IBM products deployed on OpenShift. This is usually done automatically, but a manual procedure may be also described as part of the IBM products’ deployment, which should be your primary reference. If IBM License Service is not yet present on the cluster, you can refer to the following generic resources to install it:

    Note: For IBM License Service in version older than 1.12.0 you need to set rhmpEnabled: true in IBM Licensing custom resource (for all newer versions this is automatically set). Also, in License Service older than 1.9 reporting usage is not supported.

  3. Optional - If you have Cloud Pak for Data version 4.7.x or newer run the apply entitlement command on each namespace where IBM Cloud Pak for Data is installed to enable proper usage reporting.

Result

Usage reporting to IBM Software Central is now enabled. It is queued and uploaded daily, however the initial data will be seen on Current usage after 2 days.

Enabling license usage reporting for traditionally deployed IBM products

The tool for tracking license usage for traditionally deployed IBM software is IBM License Metric Tool (ILMT). This covers software running on any virtualization other that OpenShift or Kubernetes (VMs, LPARs, LDOMs, zones as well as bare metal servers). License usage data collected by ILMT can be uploaded to IBM Software Central where it is consolidated with license usage from OpenShift clusters (delivered through IBM License Service) delivering global license usage for each offering across all deployment types (with breakdown into clusters and ILMT).

To enable usage reporting, you need to coinfigure ILMT using the following procedure:

Procedure

  1. Create or get your pull secret
    • On the main menu, click your user name, click My Account, click Pull secrets, and then click Create pull secret.
    • On the Pull secret name box, enter a unique name for your pull secret.
    • To get your pull secret, on the Your pull secret box, click the Copy button (copy icon).
    • Click Save.
  2. Configure export settings through IBM License Metric Tool.
  3. Since ILMT is not automatically uploading data to IBM Software Central, you need to periodically upload the data manually by repeating last step from the procedure above.

Result

License usage data is uploaded to IBM Software Central and will show on Current usage page within one hour.

Enabling adoption and license usage reporting through IBM Data Reporter Operator on Red Hat OpenShift

IBM Data Reporter Operator allows IBM products to report primarily adoption usage data, but this channel is also used by selected products to upload license usage. Adoption usage is a collection of product specific parameters describing product deployment, configuration and usage patterns.

IBM Data Reporter Operator uses IBM Metrics Operator to upload collected data to IBM Software Central.

Data sent to IBM Software Central

The product specifies the usage event data to send to IBM Software Central.

Procedure

  1. Install IBM Metrics Operator as a prerequisite
  2. Install IBM Data Reporter Operator from your OpenShift cluster OperatorHub Certified Operators catalog

Result

Adoption usage reporting is now enabled. Data submitted by products to IBM Data Reporter Operator is uploaded hourly. At the moment adoption data is not shown in IBM Software Central, but allows IBM product teams to analyze usage statistics for improved future product development.