topic Re: Is there a way to track concurrent license usage and lockouts? in ArcGIS Desktop Installation Support Questions

Is there a way to track concurrent license usage and lockouts?

JacquelinePursell — Thu, 04 Feb 2016 17:45:05 GMT

I want to increase the number of licenses we have but in order to justify it to the budget committee I need to prove that people are getting locked out often and that we are at max capacity often. Is there a way to track this?

Re: Is there a way to track concurrent license usage and lockouts?

JacquelinePursell — Fri, 05 Feb 2016 18:56:56 GMT

Looking across the forum I see this:

OpenLM for ArcGIS | OpenLM - Software usage monitoring & management

but it looks pricey for our budget. So I'll have to justify more cost to buy more software in order to track usage to buy even more seems silly.

anyone have anything free that reads just simple things like we reached max capacity 3 times today and 4 people got locked out? Or something like that?

Re: Is there a way to track concurrent license usage and lockouts?

V_StuartFoote — Fri, 05 Feb 2016 19:36:47 GMT

Jacqueline Pursell

Use Task Scheduler or AT (or a Python based scheduler) and parse the lmgrd server log for the ARCGIS vendor daemon.

Costs nothing but your time, and its been done many times in many flavors.

Stuart

Re: Is there a way to track concurrent license usage and lockouts?

JacquelinePursell — Fri, 05 Feb 2016 22:28:41 GMT

Thanks V Stuart Foote! Is there any documentation or python examples for this? My python skills are limited, I can do some admin tasks using it but it's not often I dive into it. I'm not a programmer by any means, but I try!

Re: Is there a way to track concurrent license usage and lockouts?

JacquelinePursell — Fri, 05 Feb 2016 22:30:27 GMT

oh and Task Scheduler... I know you can do some advanced stuff in there, but how does that work?

Re: Is there a way to track concurrent license usage and lockouts?

JacquelinePursell — Tue, 09 Feb 2016 16:44:20 GMT

Ok I ran across some python scripts but they don't seem to work... Python is not my thing, I can do some stuff but not much. lmgrd log file parser · GitHub I see the script is searching for certain words so I was looking at the lmgrd and noticed that a lot of date times are repeated (literally down to the second), not sure what that means. For peak active connections, I am not sure if that means that we were maxed out???

During about 3 weeks time, I counted 380 OUT's for ArcInfo and 134 for Viewer and 135 Peak Active Connections, what does this mean?? Does anyone out there know how to interpret an lmgrd?

also I am considering a cheap solution for license tracking, my boss said go ahead and research! So does anyone have a reasonable cost solution? less than $5k is ideal.

Re: Is there a way to track concurrent license usage and lockouts?

V_StuartFoote — Tue, 09 Feb 2016 17:34:18 GMT

So how many licensed seats of ArcGIS in the pool, and how many computers currently have (or expect to need) ArcGIS installed?

Actively metered management of licenses (Sasafras K2, or Integrity SoftTrack) would extend well beyond just your ArcGIS desktops. These and similar would provide very granular controls and reporting of licensing per launch.

For more general recording of usage either commercial product:

https://www.x-formation.com/license-statistics

https://www.openlm.com/

or even Flexera's own FlexNet Manager

http://www.flexerasoftware.com/enterprise/products/software-license-management/flexnet-manager-engineering-apps/

Cost for all are going to be driven by the size of your deployment.

But for the cost conscious, periodic parsing the plaintext debug log on the license server is perfectly acceptable. Simple scripting in script language of your choice (MS PowerShell, Perl, Python, etc.).

Stuart

Re: Is there a way to track concurrent license usage and lockouts?

JacquelinePursell — Tue, 09 Feb 2016 18:40:12 GMT

There are less than 10 people using the 5 Advanced licenses and about 50 using 6 Basics. We had recently gotten another 10 people or so with ArcGIS and I expect a few more to move up to Advanced level soon. We are starting to hire more people with GIS experience in all kinds of fields so I expect our usage to grow over the next few years exponentially.

I just got some info from OpenLM, love the price and they have some great abilities, we can revoke licenses, track usage and up times, and do all kinds of statistics. I can even set up tracking for programs without a license manager such as ArcPro or even Notepad (silly), so that is REALLY neat! For everything I want, the cost is ~3k, the basics are $1500 and the up times (Actual Usage extension) is $1500.

Flexera just told me 20k minimum for super basics, OUCH! No thanks!

Thanks for the other links, I'll check them out!

Re: Is there a way to track concurrent license usage and lockouts?

XanderBakker — Sun, 12 Dec 2021 10:23:54 GMT

I did a little test with a small snippet of Python code, to print out any DENIED licenses I have in a log file. Which yields this:

feature	user	computer	denied
"Editor"	dduquej	DDUQUEJ2	2
"ARC/INFO"	xbakker	LOLIVARE1	6

The code below.

def main():
    log_file = r'D:\Xander\EPM\Licencias\LMgrd\LOLIVARE1_10.3.LOG'
    with open (log_file, "r") as inp:
        lines=inp.readlines()

    dct = {}
    for l in lines:
        if 'DENIED' in l:
            # 13:50:40 (ARCGIS) DENIED: "ARC/INFO" xbakker@LOLIVARE1  (Licensed number of users already reached. (-4,342))
            l = l.strip()
            lst = l.split(' ')
            k = lst[3] + ' ' + lst[4]
            if k in dct:
                dct += 1
            else:
                dct = 1

    print "feature\tuser\tcomputer\tdenied"
    for k, v in dct.items():
        lst = k.split(' ')
        feature = lst[0]
        usercomp = lst[1]
        lst = usercomp.split('@')
        user = lst[0]
        comp = lst[1]
        print '{0}\t{1}\t{2}\t{3}'.format(feature, user, comp, v)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

If you are currently not experiencing any denied checkouts, you will not find any records in the log file. In that case you will need to monitor the license usage and try to project future usage:

That may be a more difficult job in case you don't have any history of usage statistics yet. We monitor the license usage with a scheduled task that executes a python script that generates some text output we load and analyze in Excel as V Stuart Foote suggested initially. I think we even used part of code posted by V Stuart Foote in earlier threads for this purpose.

It allows us to register peak license use vs time of the day:

... and distribution of license levels.

Our conclusion was that generating consciousness with the users about not leaving ArcGIS sessions and extensions activated when they are not in use and about what license level to use has helped us to not buy additional licenses.

Re: Is there a way to track concurrent license usage and lockouts?

RebeccaStrauch__GISP — Wed, 10 Feb 2016 17:16:22 GMT

Nice little script Xander Bakker

Couple questions.....what does the number under the "v" column represent? Number of times the person was denied??

And, is it possible to get the date/time stamp?

Sample of my output

Re: Is there a way to track concurrent license usage and lockouts?

XanderBakker — Wed, 10 Feb 2016 17:32:40 GMT

If you look at the line that holds the information of the DENIED license:

13:50:40 (ARCGIS) DENIED: "ARC/INFO" xbakker@LOLIVARE1  (Licensed number of users already reached. (-4,342))

... you will see that the line does not contain the date (only the time). You should probably scan the log file and register the reference to the date on previous lines and include the last date as the date of the DENIED license. I know I have done that before. I will have a look if I can find it and post it.

The list that I produce in the script includes a count for each denial of a license vs user@computer. You seem to want the data without aggregation, which is easier. On lines 12 to 16 don't add it to the dictionary, but parse and print it.

We switched to a different method a poll the license server every 15 - 20 minutes and extract the statistics based on that.

Re: Is there a way to track concurrent license usage and lockouts?

RebeccaStrauch__GISP — Wed, 10 Feb 2016 17:45:02 GMT

Thanks Xander.

We've been tracking out stats by parsing and storing in a SQL database, then running some excel scripts once a year to get info once a year to determine our usage per users, Division, etc. It summarizes "hours" etc. It's a bit cumbersome to deal with, and I'm relying on another staff person to have time to give me the spreadsheet, but it does provide a lot of info. But I think I'll look more into doing something similar to what you have so I can get the data in a little easier manner. Thanks again for the script.

Re: Is there a way to track concurrent license usage and lockouts?

XanderBakker — Sun, 12 Dec 2021 10:23:56 GMT

You could do something like this:

def main():
    log_file = r'D:\Xander\EPM\Licencias\LMgrd\LOLIVARE1_10.3.LOG'
    with open (log_file, "r") as inp:
        lines=inp.readlines()

    last_date = ''
    print "date\ttime\tfeature\tuser\tcomputer"
    for l in lines:
        if '(ARCGIS) (@ARCGIS-SLOG@) Time: ' in l:
            # 22:58:05 (ARCGIS) (@ARCGIS-SLOG@) Time: Fri Dec 19 2014 22:58:05 Hora est. Pacifico, Sudamerica
            lst = l.split('(ARCGIS) (@ARCGIS-SLOG@) Time: ')
            last_date = lst[1][:15]

        if 'DENIED' in l:
            # 13:50:40 (ARCGIS) DENIED: "ARC/INFO" xbakker@LOLIVARE1  (Licensed number of users already reached. (-4,342))
            l = l.strip()
            lst = l.split(' ')
            time = lst[0]
            feature = lst[3]
            usercomp = lst[4]
            lst = usercomp.split('@')
            user = lst[0]
            comp = lst[1]
            print '{0}\t{1}\t{2}\t{3}\t{4}'.format(last_date, time, feature, user, comp)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Which will yield in my case, this:

date	time	feature	user	computer
Thu Jan 08 2015	13:50:40	"ARC/INFO"	xbakker	LOLIVARE1
Thu Jan 08 2015	13:50:40	"ARC/INFO"	xbakker	LOLIVARE1
Thu Jan 08 2015	13:50:54	"ARC/INFO"	xbakker	LOLIVARE1
Thu Jan 08 2015	13:50:54	"ARC/INFO"	xbakker	LOLIVARE1
Thu Jan 08 2015	13:51:01	"ARC/INFO"	xbakker	LOLIVARE1
Thu Jan 08 2015	13:51:01	"ARC/INFO"	xbakker	LOLIVARE1
Fri Jan 16 2015	7:48:42	"Editor"	dduquej	DDUQUEJ2
Fri Jan 16 2015	7:56:24	"Editor"	dduquej	DDUQUEJ2

Which also reveals duplicate records and I'm sure there will be numerous situations where this script will gloriously fail...

This is why we poll the license server to extract the data we want.

Re: Is there a way to track concurrent license usage and lockouts?

V_StuartFoote — Wed, 10 Feb 2016 17:52:33 GMT

We switched to a different method a poll the license server every 15 - 20 minutes and extract the statistics based on that.

Yes, that is the other way to go, polling the server is done with a current FlexNet Publisher ** "lmutil.exe lmstat -a -c" across the network. Limitation with this is you will only track successful feature checkouts. So no indications when denials for specific features occur.

Julie Skuba's WHATLG .NET based GUI utility uses this approach.

** Bundled with the license manager on install--copy to the client running the script.

Re: Is there a way to track concurrent license usage and lockouts?

XanderBakker — Wed, 10 Feb 2016 17:57:23 GMT

I just stumbled over this GitHub project: GitHub - jmitz/ArcGISLicenseMonitor: Aids in monitoring licenses managed by ESRI's ArcGIS License Manager. Python script… May be worth to look at....

Re: Is there a way to track concurrent license usage and lockouts?

DaveTenney — Wed, 04 Mar 2020 14:57:40 GMT

i find this solution very interesting!

does the db and script need to live on the same machine that the License Manager lives? we have our LM on a standalone machine that is on our network. has anyone successfully implemented this approach?

Dave

Re: Is there a way to track concurrent license usage and lockouts?

ChelseaRozek — Wed, 04 Mar 2020 16:28:17 GMT

I just implemented it and am super excited to watch the data come in. I made a graph in Power Bi to watch the number of users each hour vs. each licenses' max allowance. I'm not 100% sure if it HAS to live on the same machine, ours just worked out that way because our LM and scheduled scripts are on the same machine. I think it needs license manager files to reference on its own machine but can then also access others by IP address, but I could be wrong.

Re: Is there a way to track concurrent license usage and lockouts?

DaveTenney — Wed, 04 Mar 2020 16:34:35 GMT

Maybe you can help me with something, first here is my setup:

local machine:

localhost/sqlexpress (license tracking db was created here)

machine on local server

ArcGIS LM

i think im running into issues with the following section:

cnxn = pyodbc.connect('DRIVER={SQL Server};SERVER=ServerNameOrIP;DATABASE=DatabaseName;UID=UserId;PWD=Password')

im not sure if i've set this part up correctly, could you share some insight on this particular section?

thanks

dave

Re: Is there a way to track concurrent license usage and lockouts?

ChelseaRozek — Wed, 04 Mar 2020 16:44:39 GMT

yes! that part was tricky for me. hope this can help:

- the code was written a while ago, so I had to update the DRIVER part to what's below for me

- we made a super complicated password, but it kept tripping up on ' " ; characters because I couldn't figure out how to escape all of them, try just alphanumeric characters to eliminate that as a potential issue

cnxn = pyodbc.connect("DRIVER={ODBC Driver 17 for SQL Server};SERVER=servername.ewashtenaw.org;DATABASE=databasename;UID=username;PWD=password;")

also, I ended up passing the ip address of the machine the LM and script are on into the script when run, not 'localhost' or blank. i thought maybe you only needed ip addresses if you were looking at LMs elsewhere too, but this is what's working for me so I'll keep it.

fyi my database is on another server than the LM/scripts

Re: Is there a way to track concurrent license usage and lockouts?

DaveTenney — Thu, 05 Mar 2020 14:18:57 GMT

first...thank you for all your help!

this may be a silly question, but does the odbc driver need to be installed on the machine that is running the script and LM in order to connect back to the machine running SQL?

thanks again