Author: Alicia Ijaz
Managing Consultant at Livingstone Group

If you have heard about the IBM License Metric Tool (ILMT), you will be aware that it is a mandatory requirement in order to benefit from sub-capacity licensing (unless you are using another approved or certified tool such as Flexera One). It is well known that the majority of IBM customers struggle with successful ILMT agent deployment as well as ensuring that the version of ILMT is kept up to date on a regular basis.

However, did you know that the steps that come after the agent deployment - applying correct software classifications, instance exclusions/suppressions and removing inactive computers to name a few, are often overlooked?

ILMT reporting and how often to review

I have seen IBM customers deploy the ILMT agent on all servers where IBM software is installed and then get back to their daily duties, thinking the sub-capacity responsibilities end there, when in reality it is also important to ensure the report being produced by ILMT is accurate and a good representation of your license position and this requires constant review and maintenance. At a minimum, the reports produced by ILMT need to be reviewed on a quarterly basis, however, in order to remain more in control of your estate, I would recommend to review monthly.

To give you an example of the impact this can make, I have personally seen the PVU value reported by ILMT reduce by over 80% just by correctly classifying components, performing exclusions and bundling, while not having to make any changes to the actual IBM estate. I have also seen many cases where this careful review has highlighted instances of software deployments to clients that were not expected and are able to be removed which results in risk avoidance and/or future cost savings at renewal.

Cloud Pak entitlements 

One of the common situations we see is when Cloud Pak entitlements have been purchased and ILMT picks up every instance of the products as part of the Cloud Pak. For example, instances of MQ are reported towards the license requirement for Cloud Pak for Integration when in reality, they are standalone MQ installs that are used in support of App Connect Enterprise and for a completely different environment to the one where Cloud Pak entitlements were purchased for.

I have summarised a few of the key tasks below, however, this most certainly does not cover every action that needs to be considered! There is also a link to IBM Documentation about managing software inventory and metric utilization for further details which you can access here.

Five key takeaways for ILMT reporting

• ILMT performs automated bundling to assign discovered components to products from the software catalog. By importing part numbers into ILMT, you can increase the accuracy of this process. If a product instance is used as a supporting program of another IBM product, you should assign the supporting component to the main product.
  
  
• It is not mandatory to confirm the assignment of software components, however, if assignments are not confirmed, ILMT can automatically reassign the components to different products, for example, if the ILMT version is upgraded and a new catalog is uploaded as a result of this. Therefore, it is recommended to confirm all assignments.
  
  
• In order to ensure that the ILMT report is an accurate representation of your estate, all discovered components need to be assigned to the correct products and Cloud Paks.
  
  
• Exclusions are done at a product level and Suppressions are done at a component level. Generally, exclusions are for non-licensable installs of the product and suppressions are for false positives.
  
  
• In order to ensure that decommissioned servers are not counted towards the metric quantity from the date of decommission onwards, you must remove them from the ILMT tool.

I understand that this can be a time-consuming and daunting exercise.

At Livingstone, we have a team of professionals with years of experience in IBM licensing and ILMT and we assist our clients by advising on which actions need to be performed and also how to complete those actions correctly. This can help to take away some of the pressure of ensuring you remain fully compliant with sub-capacity licensing terms.