What is the best practice according top Flexera to accept (or not) IBM Recommended License Changes that come in? Someone decided to "help" me by accepting ALL the recommended changes without reviewing or considering impact to the licensing. I have now spent the better part of 2 months trying to get my consumption back in line. Every time I make a change or try to reverse the change that I didn't make a ripple effect happens and several licenses are affected. I'm at a loss as to what to do. Typically I read what the recommended changes are and make a decision to either accept or reject. Unfortunately that didn't happen in this instance and I'm doing clean up.
The same thing happened to me early on when I took the recommendation of someone at Flexera and accepted ALL changes. That took a month to clean up as well. Since then I've been very careful about making changes.
How does one know to accept these changes in the first place and how do we really know what the impact will be? What happens if you do not accept the changes?
Should I open a case with Flexera to address this?
Thanks,
Shelby
Sep 10, 2020 09:32 AM
At each license reconciliation, the system checks all your licenses that reference SKUs with the latest definitions in the SKU and PURL. Any difference between your license record and the latest information in the libraries are brought to your attention, so this would explain why you are seeing the changes.
While I would not recommend broadly accepting all license changes, I would recommend reviewing each suggested change for its pros/cons as everyone's situation and use case is unique.
Overall, you would need to work within the constraints of the agreement of what you actually purchased from a vendor, which may be different than the current SKU/PURL definition.
Sep 15, 2020 01:53 PM
Accepting all recommended changes (without review) for license records which are already set up and configured as you want them is not something I would normally suggest doing without a specific reason for doing that - as you note, it can be damaging. That is a key reason why FlexNet generally won't apply recommended changes automatically: it doesn't want to assume to know more about your licenses than you know. Accepting all recommended changes may be helpful in situations where there is broad uncertainty about how license records in FlexNet have been set up and you're wanting to get back to a clean baseline to start refinement from, or in a situation where records are just being set up for the first time.
As @JohnTech has described, the Recommended License Changes page will identify differences between the way that you have your license records set up and modeled compared to the default license settings suggested in the PURL/SKU Libraries. The settings from the libraries are useful to use as a starting point or if you are unsure what settings to use for a license, but shouldn't be universally taken as the only possible way to model your entitlements. There are plenty of good reasons why you may have different settings configured on your licenses compared to the defaults (e.g. if you have non-default terms with in your license, or the way you model your organizational data is different from what the defaults expect). Where you have non-default settings selected like this, you would not normally want to accept every recommended change to override your settings.
Sep 15, 2020 09:05 PM
At each license reconciliation, the system checks all your licenses that reference SKUs with the latest definitions in the SKU and PURL. Any difference between your license record and the latest information in the libraries are brought to your attention, so this would explain why you are seeing the changes.
While I would not recommend broadly accepting all license changes, I would recommend reviewing each suggested change for its pros/cons as everyone's situation and use case is unique.
Overall, you would need to work within the constraints of the agreement of what you actually purchased from a vendor, which may be different than the current SKU/PURL definition.
Sep 15, 2020 01:53 PM
Accepting all recommended changes (without review) for license records which are already set up and configured as you want them is not something I would normally suggest doing without a specific reason for doing that - as you note, it can be damaging. That is a key reason why FlexNet generally won't apply recommended changes automatically: it doesn't want to assume to know more about your licenses than you know. Accepting all recommended changes may be helpful in situations where there is broad uncertainty about how license records in FlexNet have been set up and you're wanting to get back to a clean baseline to start refinement from, or in a situation where records are just being set up for the first time.
As @JohnTech has described, the Recommended License Changes page will identify differences between the way that you have your license records set up and modeled compared to the default license settings suggested in the PURL/SKU Libraries. The settings from the libraries are useful to use as a starting point or if you are unsure what settings to use for a license, but shouldn't be universally taken as the only possible way to model your entitlements. There are plenty of good reasons why you may have different settings configured on your licenses compared to the defaults (e.g. if you have non-default terms with in your license, or the way you model your organizational data is different from what the defaults expect). Where you have non-default settings selected like this, you would not normally want to accept every recommended change to override your settings.
Sep 15, 2020 09:05 PM
Sep 28, 2020 09:24 AM