App Portal / FNMS License

[gymason1]

When an App Portal catalog item is mapped to a FlexNet Manager Suite application, and that application is linked to multiple FNMS licenses the 'Available License' count is incorrect. We are having problems with apps such as Visual Studio Professional v2022 (without MSDN) since it is currently linked to multiple licenses. One license is just for that app, the other licenses have version or edition upgrade rights to VS Pro 2022 or are licenses for VS with MSDN. Each of these licenses have different quantities of available license. But when the max is reached in the VS Pro 2022 license, the App Portal still shows licenses are available. We are running App Portal and FNMS v2022 R2. Does anyone know how App Portal identifies which license to use to get the license position from? Has anyone run into this issue?

[CharlesW]

I have to be honest and say that I'm not 100% sure on this, but I seem to remember that the license count would be a sum of all available licenses for all all of the licenses that had a given FlexeraID assigned. From an App Broker perspective, this is a bit of a black box as App Broker simply calls the SOAP API SoftwareLicenseGetAvailableByFlexeraID() in FNMS, passing in a FlexeraID, and receives a count back.

I dug around a bit, and found that the SoftwareLicenseGetAvailableByFlexeraID() API calls a stored procedure named SoftwareLicenseGetAvailableByFlexeraID in the FNMS Compliance DB. If you really wanted to understand where the count was coming from, my suggestion would be to start by looking at this stored procedure in the FNMSCompliance DB. If you are better at SQL than I am, I think that this will explain exactly how the license count is determined. 

[gymason1]

Thank you so much for the information, I was afraid the answer would be something as you described. It's very disappointing as there is no way to have only a single license for VS Pro 2022 when we own licenses for various versions of VS and VS with MSDN. 

[jdempsey]

Sorry for being late to the party.  I'm not sure I completely follow your concern.  There are a few things that can be configured in FNMS and within the App Portal catalog item that can impact the response that App Portal gets back from the license check call to FNMS.  For example, if you've configured "Restrictions" on the license that limit where that license can be used, that will be factored into the response.  Additionally, if you've configured the App Portal catalog item to only use Enterprise Groups, it will only look for license entitlements available within the Enterprise Groups for the specified user/device.  On the other hand, if you've configured the catalog item to look "Globally" for an available entitlement, or if you've configured it to look first at Enterprise Groups and then fall back to Global, you'll effectively be looking for any available entitlement (though license "Restrictions" would still apply).  Then, from a consumption perspective (not related to the license check), when reconcile is running, it will use the license priority property configured within the application in FNMS to determine which license to consume when multiple licenses could apply.  If what you're trying to do is limit App Portal to only issue a specific license type, one workaround might be to configure a "local application" in FNMS and associate that one license to the new application.  Then you can use the local application (ARL/Flexera ID) when configuring your catalog item.