Reconciliation of licenses across global entities

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 4 minutes to read
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    Summary of Reconciliation of licenses across global entities

    This feature enables ServiceNow customers to share software license entitlements across different organizational entities by creating consumption rules. These rules limit which entities can consume specific entitlements during the license reconciliation process, allowing centralized license purchasing (e.g., by a cost center) to serve multiple other cost centers without requiring explicit license allocations.

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    Key Features

    • Consumption Rules: Define restrictions on entitlement usage based on reconciliation groups such as Company, Department, Region, Cost Center, or Country. If no rule is defined, all entities can use the entitlement.
    • Rule Reuse: One consumption rule can apply to multiple entitlements, simplifying management.
    • Linking Rules to Entitlements: After creation, consumption rules must be linked to entitlements to enforce usage limits. Without active rules, entitlements remain unrestricted.
    • Hierarchy Support: Consumption rules support parent-child relationships within groups, allowing inclusion of child entities without creating separate rules.
    • License Pools: Reserve a subset of license rights for specific entities within consumption rules, ensuring guaranteed access while allowing sharing of remaining rights.
    • Unrestricted Consumption Option: Allows any entity to consume rights while still reserving license pools for defined entities.
    • Allocations Precedence: License allocations override consumption rules and do not require consumption rules to function. Allocations outside defined rules are honored and counted against license pools if applicable.
    • Reconciliation Results: Consumption rules affect the reconciliation output, showing usage by group or combined totals depending on grouping settings.
    • Reporting: Detailed consumption data is available via License Consumption Breakdown and Licenses Required By tables, including identification of which consumption rule applies.
    • Unsupported License Metrics: Consumption rules do not apply to IBM RVUs, IBM UVUs, and Workday metrics.
    • Upgrade Behavior: During upgrades from pre-Yokohama releases, consumption rules are automatically created based on existing grouping properties to enforce entitlement usage restrictions.

    Practical Use and Benefits

    By implementing consumption rules, ServiceNow customers can:

    • Centralize license purchases within specific entities and share entitlements seamlessly with other departments or cost centers.
    • Avoid complex allocation setups by leveraging consumption rules to control entitlement usage.
    • Ensure license pools guarantee availability for priority groups while allowing flexible sharing.
    • Use hierarchical groupings to reduce administrative overhead when managing multiple related entities.
    • Maintain compliance by accurately reconciling license consumption per organizational entity.

    Example Scenario

    Three departments—Sales, HR, and Marketing—each have a consumption rule linked to a single entitlement (ENT A). After reconciliation, ENT A can be used by all three departments without requiring separate license allocations, simplifying license management and reducing administrative effort.

    Share entitlements across different entities within your organization by creating consumption rules for entitlements.

    Limit consumption of entitlements to specific set of entities during the reconciliation process. This allows a cost center to purchase licenses and provide it as a service to other cost centers to license software running on their devices without requiring allocations.

    Overview of consumption rules

    Create consumption rules for entitlements to restrict all entities from using that entitlement. If a consumption rule isn't defined for an entitlement and when the reconciliation process runs, any entity can use that entitlement regardless of who owns that entitlement.

    Consumption rules can be created for the following reconciliation groups:
    • Company
    • Department
    • Region
    • Cost center
    • Country

    A single consumption rule can be used across multiple entitlements that helps in reuse of consumption rules.

    After you create consumption rules in the License operations view, you must link a consumption rule to one or more entitlements in the Entitlement Consumption Rules related list in the entitlement page. After you link a consumption rule to an entitlement, consumption is limited to the users or devices belonging to at least one of the specified entities specified in the consumption rule.

    If no active consumption rules exist in the Entitlement Consumption Rules related list, anyone in your organization can use the entitlement.
    Note:
    Consumption rules aren’t supported for the following license metrics: IBM RVUs, IBM UVUs, and Workday.
    Irrespective of grouping, consumption rules apply and licensing is restricted. After you link consumption rules with an entitlement and run the reconciliation process, the following actions take place:
    • with grouping: The reconciliation result appears in the form of product results, software model results, and licenses metric results; all generated individually for each group.
    • without grouping: The reconciliation result appears in the form of product results, software model results, and license metric results, all under a single heading.

    The License Consumption Breakdown [samp_lmr_consumption_result] table reports the allocated and unallocated rights used per license metric results per consumption rule.

    Further reporting can be done through the consumption rule column in the Licenses Required By [samp_licenses_required_by] table. The consumption rule column stamps the consumption rule satisfied by that entity.

    Use case for consumption rules

    Let's say that you've created three separate consumption rules for three departments, namely Sales, HR, and Marketing.

    You now link all these three consumption rules to an entitlement, titled ENT A. After you run reconciliation, ENT A can be used by the Sales, HR, and Marketing departments. No allocations need to be created for ENT A.

    Parent and child hierarchy

    Consumption rules also support parent or child hierarchy for groups. If you have a consumption rule for parent company A, you can choose to include child company B and child company C without creating separate rules.

    The Create New Consumption Rule page in the Enterprise Asset Workspace lets you include the children of the company, department, and cost center in the consumption rule. This reduces the effort required to create individual consumption rules for each entity and to update consumption rules when new entities are added, update, or deleted.

    License pools

    Consumption rules allow you to define license pools for entities. A license pool is a reservation of rights for a group entity defined on a consumption rule. License pools are specific to an entity per entitlement. If no license pool is defined, the entity can consume rights, but none will be set aside as a guarantee.

    For example, an entitlement with 100 available rights can have an HR consumption rule with a license pool of 50. This sets aside 50 rights for HR consumers, and the remaining 50 rights can be used by HR or other entities defined in the consumption rules.

    You can view the consumption rules and associated license pools in the Entitlement Consumption Rules related list in the entitlement page.

    If you don't want license consumption to be limited to entities in the consumption rules, you can use the Unrestricted consumption check box on the entitlement page. Once this check box is selected, any entity can consume rights, but the entities in the consumption rules have a reservation of rights set aside.
    Note:
    While both allocations and the Unrestricted consumption check box allow other groups to access the entitlement; only allocations provide priority.

    Allocations

    Allocations take precedence over consumption rules. You don't need to create consumption rules for allocations to work. For example, let's say you have a consumption rule that states that only HR devices can use this entitlement. This entitlement can still include allocations outside of HR such as Sales or Marketing.

    Allocations are automatically counted towards license pools when the first applicable consumption rule is satisfied. This is the default setting, but allocations will still be honored even if there is no defined consumption rule or license pool.

    Any new allocations that exceed the license pool count will be honored. Any allocations that do not satisfy a consumption rule will also be honored.

    Upgrading from Pre Utah releases

    If you're upgrading from a Pre Yokohama release and based on what you have selected in the com.snc.samp.recon.group and com.snc.samp.recon.subgroup properties (in the Software Asset Management Properties page), the following upgrade actions take place:
    • Grouping: Company, Cost Center, Region, Department, or Country is selected. A consumption rule is automatically created for the grouping entity selected if the entitlement is in use. For example, if Department is selected, and Company is selected as the subgroup, then one combined consumption rule is created for both the group, Department and the subgroup, Company. When reconciliation is run, the entitlement usage is restricted to only the Department group and the Company subgroup.
      Note:
      An entitlement is considered to be in use, if in the Entitlement table, the Install status column has the value 1.
    • Non-grouping: None is selected. No consumption rule is created as reconciliation runs without grouping. The entitlements can be used by any group.