How is the number of license counted?

[Jing Liu]

the customer wants to know how do we count the oracle probe licenses usage?

Is it per monitored server or is it per oracle probe installation?

[Yu Ishitani]

Please tell the reason why this license consumption is concerned.
From technical perspective, license consumption only matters how many robots can be attached to one hub.
From probe license perspective, there is no limit how many Oracle servers are being monitored.
From billing/usage report perspective, might be a concern. If that is the case, generate usage report via usage_metering probe.
Regards, Yu Ishitani

[Jing Liu]

Billing/usage report perspective.

As per document,

"The usage_metering probe counts the number of resources that are monitored by the monitoring probes. The probe counts each monitored device as one resource."

For oracle probe  "The billing report includes the number of monitored databases. If the monitored databases change within a month, the report uses the largest value."

Customer reported that for the particular end customer the database monitoring has not changed for over a month and they are monitoring a few databases (more than 10).

But usage_metering probe primary hub summary report under the "Overall Billing Packs Summary" section in the "Pack Name" column for pack "CA NM - Server and Application Pack"  it has a "Total Unit Count" of "5.00" with an "Referenced Probes" indication of "cluster,oracle,sqlserver,cdm".

For this count seems to be counting the installation of these probes, this because they actually have installed 1-cluster probe, 2-oracle probes, 1-sql server probe and 1-cdm probe.

[David Michel]

In my lab cdm shows up under  CA NM - Server Pack and the db probes show up under CA NM - Server and Application Pack.

------------------------------
Support Engineer
Broadcom
------------------------------

[Jing Liu]

Another related question is how to estimate the scale of monitored server for one probe.

[David Michel]

When considering scale for determining the max load for one instance of the probe consider how many metrics are to be monitored and the monitoring interval.

------------------------------
Support Engineer
Broadcom
------------------------------

[Ashish Aggarwal]

It is countered by server.

[Ioannis Soufrilas]

Hello All and thank you for your assistance, I am in direct contact with the end customer that is currently pending a reply for this issue, to keep this discussion as focused as possible I will rephrase our findings with the hope to further simplify the issue, below our findings in point format and the question originating from the customer.

- Official Documentation of the usage_metering probe states clearly that Oracle probe licensing is under the server-app with a rank 30 and is per monitored database.
- The billing report of the usage_metering probe executed on the production environment for this customer does not reflect the documentation as it has a very small count that relates to the Oracle probe installation and not the monitored systems of the Oracle probe.
- We have two contradicting factors that could suggest a possibly outdated documentation or a miss functional usage_metering probe.
- Either case we need to know what we should report to the customer as far as billing is concerned since they have recently requested this information.

Core question would be, which of the two variants should we inform the customer as far as their usage and billing is concerned in order to be compliant, should we use the usage_metering billing report (small usage count) or take the documentation at heart and count the monitored databases (much larger count).

Thank you all in advance as we await your response.

[David Michel]

Best to connect up with Sales to get a definitive answer.

------------------------------
Support Engineer
Broadcom
------------------------------

[Yu Ishitani]

So you meant to say what should be appropriate driver to formalize bill (charge) ?

- Number of oracle probe instances (in total) in the environment.
- Number of monitored oracle systems (in total) in the environment.

[Ioannis Soufrilas]

Thank you for your response and clarification, one last question, is there a way to get a report on the monitored oracle systems since usage_metering probe does not reflect this number, how are we supposed to count these (hoping not manually).

There are around 35 monitored oracle systems around 5 are inactive profile connections that are not monitored, a few are self monitoring (we put the oracle probe to monitor AXA and UIM oracle databases to see our own performance) and a few that we see are references to the same systems (multiple connections/profiles to same server and db instance).

So in this case it will be 5(billing report) + 35(overall oracle monitored systems) - 5(inactive) - 2(self monitoring) - 1(duplicate) = 32

You see that the above process is not as official as expected and it does not follow the billing methodology of averaging usage in a monthly period, with the above today they have 32 tomorrow they deactivate 10 profiles.

How can we create a proper report for the customer.

[Jay Wink]

Below is how we licensed these in Pre-Sales.  Note, if the usage_meter probe isn't picking it up correctly, please make sure you have the latest version and if it still does not look right, please contact Support.

The Oracle probe and all DB probes are licensed based on the number of DB Instances you are connecting to.  DB Instance = DB Engine also.  Another way to look at it is the number of ODBC connections you have setup on each probe as well.

If I have 1 probe remotely monitoring and have 10 connections that I am using 10 profiles.  This would be 10 licenses.  Now these 10 connections could be on 10 different servers or on 5 servers.  It is about the end DB Instance/Engine as each ODBC Connection is a separate node being monitored.

Jay Wink
Customer Success Architect

------------------------------
Customer Success Architect
Broadcom
------------------------------

[Jing Liu]

@Jay Wink Thanks for your response.

@Ioannis Soufrilas Seems the question turns out to be how to get the monitored nodes into the billing report? Right?

[Ioannis Soufrilas]

Yes, that is exactly right, we need to have some sort of reporting mechanism via the usage_metering probe (latest version that doesn't contain the information) or any other means or reporting mechanism. We need something to send to the customer that will report their license usage that is official and correct.