One of the things that I’ve been asked in every operations situation is what licenses do we need for our servers. This is a rare request, often once a year, but it results in a bunch of work to figure out what’s running.
I hate these requests because they always cause delays in other work.
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What’s Running?
Redgate Monitor makes this easy to track (if you’re monitoring all your servers). In the Estate tab, there is a Licensing item. If you check this out, you see something like this:
This is a quick view of our systems, letting me know what cores we have in service based on the edition. This is a quick report, and if you’re monitoring all prod systems, this gives you a pretty close look at what you need.
The exceptions here are that we are reporting all cores for all nodes in HA/DR setups, and that might be more licenses than you need. However, you can subtract all the standby nodes if you have Software Assurance on those systems since you do not need to license those.
Of course, you shouldn’t need to license dev/test systems if you run developer edition, and you should.
You can filter by groups or other items that can help you focus on part of your estate. This is the standard Redgate Monitor at the top set of filters.
There also is an “Export” button on this page, so you can save off your data as an Excel XLSX.
Summary
This section of the Estate tab gives you a quick view of your obligations to Microsoft for licensing. It’s a nice way to track this and report on it when you need to audit this information without spending a lot of time compiling the information.
Your Finance group will thank you.
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