FlexNet / App Portal (request history) trending reports?

[Ralph_Crowley]

Greetings!

Does anyone know of a way to leverage the App Portal / App Broker request data in FlexNet for creating trending reports? We currently have the FNMP API enabled for App Portal to call FlexNet for license reservations when users request (licensed) SW - but is there a way on the FlexNet side to use that same request data for trending reports? Ex: track the number of times  / users who request Adobe Acrobat over a given time period, that consumed a license tracked in FlexNet. I'm assuming the data is already within FlexNet (since there is a web call to reserve the license) - but how / where can we leverage that data for building a trending report in FlexNet? 

[ChrisG]

That's an interesting question/idea!

FlexNet doesn't actually store enough data about requests in App Broker to be able to give trending insights along the lines of what you're talking about here. When a request for an application that will consume a license in FlexNet is received, a record of that is indeed created as a "reservation" in the database. However that reservation is transient (it disappears after the software is installed or 30 days, whichever is sooner).

I don't know the App Broker system so well, but I think there may be ways in there to report on and get insight into historic request trends.

I'm not sure how many App Broker experts will be looking at discussion in this particular forum (which is focused on FlexNet Manager Suite), but I'll share this thread with a few people I know who work in that area in case they have any further comments to add.

[tbesse]

Hello,

App Portal has this data available, there is in fact a great number of reports available. I would recommend consuming it from App Portal.

Best regards
Thorsten

[Ralph_Crowley]

Thanks Chris, it just seems to be a common question that SAM teams in other organizations would encounter from management as well ("what business areas / teams are consuming 'x' number of licenses, & what are the business needs that are driving those requests"). We've had to build a custom solution in the past to merge the 2 data sources, but were hoping to move towards a more 'out of the box' type capability. 

[pratulpatel1]

Hello @Ralph_Crowley , 2018 R1 release of App Broker / App Portal has an executive dashboard. It shows a lot of data including what you are looking for. Charts for software titles requested in a given period of time is part of the dashboard along with capability to download the data. You can get more information from HERE. Let us know if you have any more questions.

[Ralph_Crowley]

Thanks - we're aware of the request history reports in App Portal, but I probably wasn't clear in my earlier description - Our SAM team needs the request history to match against license consumption / availability (in FlexNet). So for example, there were 50 requests for a SW title last week which reserved 50 licenses, so now we have 'x' number of available licenses. FlexNet gives us the # of available licenses, but doesn't have the consumption rate or consumption source (that's the data in app portal). Apologies again if I wasn't clear with the original request.

[pratulpatel1]

Ah yes, in that you will have to manually match up against all the sources for now. We will take this idea for a future consideration.