Reconciliation of licenses across global entities

  • Release version: Xanadu
  • Updated August 1, 2024
  • 4 minutes to read
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    Summary of Reconciliation of licenses across global entities

    This feature enables ServiceNow customers to share and manage software license entitlements across various organizational entities by creating consumption rules. These rules restrict which entities—such as companies, departments, regions, cost centers, or countries—can consume specific entitlements during the license reconciliation process. This approach facilitates centralized license purchasing by cost centers, which can then provide licenses as a service to other cost centers without requiring manual allocations.

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    Key Features

    • Consumption Rules: Define restrictions on entitlement usage to specific groups within the organization. Without these rules, any entity can consume the entitlement.
    • Entity Grouping: Consumption rules apply across reconciliation groups including company, department, region, cost center, and country, and a single rule can be associated with multiple entitlements for reuse.
    • Parent-Child Hierarchy Support: Rules can include child entities under a parent entity, simplifying management and updates as organizational structures change.
    • License Pools: Allow reservation of license rights for specific entities, guaranteeing availability for defined groups while permitting shared usage of remaining rights.
    • Unrestricted Consumption Option: Allows any entity to consume the entitlement while still reserving license pools for specified groups.
    • Allocations Integration: Allocations override consumption rules by granting priority usage rights, and they are automatically counted against license pools where applicable.
    • Reporting: Detailed reconciliation results and license consumption breakdowns per consumption rule support transparent tracking of allocated and unallocated rights.
    • Upgrade Handling: During upgrades from pre-Xanadu releases, consumption rules are automatically created based on configured grouping properties to enforce entitlement restrictions.
    • Exclusions: Consumption rules do not apply to licenses with IBM RVUs, IBM UVUs, and Workday metrics.

    Practical Application

    By implementing consumption rules, organizations can:

    • Centralize license purchases in one cost center and distribute usage rights efficiently across departments without manual allocations.
    • Ensure compliance by restricting entitlement consumption to authorized entities only.
    • Reserve license quantities (license pools) for critical groups, preventing overconsumption by others.
    • Leverage hierarchical structures to reduce administrative overhead in managing license consumption.
    • Maintain flexibility with unrestricted consumption when needed, while still preserving reservation rights.
    • Benefit from allocations that provide priority access and are automatically reconciled with consumption rules.

    Expected Outcomes

    After configuring consumption rules and linking them to entitlements, ServiceNow customers can expect:

    • Accurate reconciliation results segmented by entity groups, enhancing visibility into license usage.
    • Improved license compliance and optimized license utilization across global entities.
    • Reduced need for manual license allocations, saving administrative effort and costs.
    • Clear reporting on license consumption and rights reservation through dedicated tables and reconciliation views.
    • Smooth transition during upgrades with automatic creation of appropriate consumption rules based on existing grouping configurations.

    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 Xanadu 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.