We’ve covered a bit of ground in this blog series on Microsoft SPLA reporting with SPL Tracker. We’ll get into more nitty gritty details below, but first, a review . . .

The Need for Microsoft SPLA Reporting

Back in Part 1 of this blog series, we explored how SPL Tracker targets the widely recognized need for more effective tracking of Microsoft SPLA – and related – licensing.

In Part 2 of our blog series, we reviewed how to associate defined license types with Active Directory groups using SPL Tracker.

Now, in Part 3 of this series, you will witness firsthand the power of correlating actual license usage with the groups that control access to the license types.

Looking Back at Actual Licensing Usage

Once you have associated license types with groups in the Associate Groups section of the SPL Tracker, click on Step 3 – Assess Actual Usage.

In this section, you will need to define the activity lookback period that SPL Tracker uses to determine whether or not specific accounts have been actively using certain license types, such as Remote Desktop Services SALs or Microsoft Office SALs. Typically, this is 30, 45, or 60 days. Enter your preferred lookback period, and then click “Fetch/Refetch Usage Data.”

Active Users vs. Inactive Users

Once the SPL Tracker consults Remote Desktop Reporter’s database to determine usage for all license types, it will display the active users and inactive users for each type in a list. Inactive users are defined as the user accounts which had permission to use the license type (via membership in the associated Active Directory group), but for whatever reason did not use that class of license within the lookback period.

Moving on to Step 4 – Restrict Access, you can determine which inactive users will be denied access moving forward, by removing them from the corresponding Active Directory group. Even more importantly, you can determine how the user has access to the particular license type, via direct group membership, or via a nested group relationship.

In the next blog article in this series, we’ll see how you can automate this process so that “auto pruning” of inactive users takes place automatically on a monthly basis. Those removed users, if access is not restored during the next monthly reporting period, will result in an ongoing cost savings to your organization. Watch for our next blog article in this series.

And remember, SPL Tracker is downloaded with RDPSoft’s Remote Desktop Reporter. You can download a free 30 day trial today.

In Part 1 of our blog series “Automating SPLA Reporting With SPL Tracker,” we discussed the challenges inherent in SPLA monthly reporting requirements faced by MSPs and how to define classes of license usage in SPL Tracker.

Now we’re going to show how you can pair these license types with the Active Directory or local machine groups which serve as the gatekeepers for accessing these types of licensed applications or services.

Associating Groups in SPL Tracker

Once you have defined the license types for which the Service Provider Licensing Tracker (SPL Tracker) will track usage in Step 1 of the program, click on Step 2 – Associate Groups. Here you will be able to associate the license types you specified in Step 1 with one or more Active Directory groups in a particular client domain.

If you are an MSP or SaaS provider using workgroups instead of domains for your client networks, you can just as easily specify local machine groups in this program area. Just select “Computer” instead of “Domain”, and enter the name of the Remote Desktop or Citrix XenApp server that hosts the groups which control access to your license types.

Once you enter a computer name or domain name, you can click “Fetch Groups” to retrieve a list of all groups on a computer or in an Active Directory.

SPL Tracker Configuration Files Across Client Domains or Workgroups

It’s very easy to create template configuration files which you can reuse across all of your many client domains or workgroups. If each of your clients has their own domain, enter %MACHINEDOMAIN% for the name of the domain, or if each client has their own single server workgroup, enter LOCALHOST for the name of the computer.

Then, provided your group names are standardized across all client domains and/or client servers, you can use the same configuration file for all instances of SPL Tracker – greatly simplifying deployment. We’ll have more on this subject in an upcoming post in this blog series.

You can create as many group/license type associations as needed – just click the “Add New Association” button to create each additional one required in Step 2.

In the upcoming Part 3 blog post in this series, we will review how SPL Tracker assesses the variance between actual license usage and allowed license usage. This can have a huge positive effect on your bottom line over time – so please stay tuned!

SPL Tracker is downloaded with RDPSoft’s Remote Desktop Reporter. You can download a free 30 day trial today.