July 6, 2020

Citrix License Usage Insights

Purpose

This article describes a new Citrix Cloud service, License Server Usage Insights, that is available to all Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop customers. Read on to find out why I think this is a big deal especially for customers that that have not transitioned to Citrix Cloud subscription licensing (aka own perpetual licenses).


Trend View: day view but month and year available


Symptom

If you have a single on-prem Virtual Apps and Desktops license server OR have completely transitioned to the Virtual Apps and Desktops service then this new on-prem License Usage Insights may not be for you because Studio gives you a good view of license consumption.

This new service may be beneficial if you have a larger environment that has gotten complicated over the years and there is not a simple answer to, "how are we doing on Citrix licenses?".

Beneficial Scenarios

  • You are a Citrix architect or admin and use Excel to calculate Virtual Apps and Desktops license usage across your enterprise
  • Or you have more than one license server (for whatever reason)
  • Or you have license servers in completely separated Active Directory forests
  • Or you have more than one license type and this includes both Virtual Apps vs Virtual Apps and Desktops OR you own both concurrent and user/device licensing
  • Or your management likes to see pretty graphs of Citrix consumption from time to time
  • Or you would like to give someone in your organization access to consumption but do not want to give them RDP access to the actual Citrix license servers
  • Or you spend time logged into citrix.cloud.com and it would be more convenient to view license consumption there

Resolution

If one or more the scenarios above apply to you then read on. License Server Usage Insights connects your on-prem license server(s) to Citrix Cloud. It can then aggregate usage from across many license servers and present them in a pretty dashboard.

Setup

  1. Upgrade your license server. You will need to be running version 11.15.0.0 or newer. Download the license server here https://www.citrix.com/downloads/licensing/. Upgrade instructions https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/licensing/current-release/upgrade.html
  2. Enable Call Home on the license server.  If you do not have this enabled you will not get the blue "Register" button shown in the screenshot below. See the link in the next step for the details.
  3. Register the license server with Citrix Cloud https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-cloud/citrix-cloud-management/citrix-cloud-on-premises-registration.html
  4. Wait 24 hours for it to report in the first time. This is a very important step.
  5. Login to citrix.cloud.com and check. As mentioned above, no matter how many times I refreshed the page, it did take 24 hours to populate. Click on the menu on the left and choose Licensing.

You didn't think I would show a real code?


Click Register


FWIW, Citrix license server upgrades were a standard practice back when I was consulting anytime I was upgrading anything in the environment. Not only would you typically get security improvements and bug fixes but it would ensure that a component upgrade would not get halted due to newer license server requirements.

That is all there is to it. I hope this gives you better visibility into your environment.

SageLike Post ID: SL0025

Applies to:

References:

Brian @sagelikebrian

1 comment:

  1. I was missing step number two, Enable Call Home at original publication. If you do not have a blue Register button as shown above that could be why.

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