License Violation Effects and Actions

Monitor requires a license in order to store and report on historical license utilization information. If at any point a license is not available while the server is running, the server enters a licensing "grace period" of five days and the system will continue to operate as normal.

If the grace period is exceeded, the data will continue to be tracked, but will be obfuscated (encrypted) and will not be loaded into the database. This data will be stored in the checkouts data files just as normal tracking data would, but will appear as an unreadable string for the records that were obtained during the license violation. License violations typically fall within three categories:
  • The Altair Accelerator license is expired.
  • If using RLM, the license server is down at the time of the entry in the log. If using a license key file, the key file is missing. In either of these two cases, all data will be obfuscated until license availability is restored.
  • There are more observed users across the various monitors than what the Altair Accelerator license contains. For example, for a license of 50 users, and Monitor detects 56 unique users at a given point in time, the server assigns an index to each unique user and all checkouts for users 51 to 56 will be saved as an obfuscated entry.

Deobfuscation

The server keeps track of all data files that contain obfuscated data. In order to deobfuscate the data, a valid license file must be in place beforehand. If the license violation was due to an expiration or an overage of licensed users, the license file must contain a back-dated start date and/or an increased number of licensed users in order to allow for deobfuscating the historical records during the time of the violation. Monitor provides two methods that can be used to deobfuscate the data in these files and load the resulting output into the database:
Web-based Interface
To check for the existence of obfuscated data and deobfuscate it, visit the Database Information area of the System page, located in the Admin tab. If obfuscated data has been generated by the system, the data files that contain the obfuscated data will show up at the bottom of the page, along with a button to use to perform the deobfuscation:


Figure 1. Database Information Page
Command Line Interface
In the CLI, the lmmgr deobfuscate command can be used. To use the command, first setup the CLI: 
% vovproject enable licmon
After setting up the CLI, the command can be executed: 
% lmmgr deobfuscate
If more precise control over the deobfuscation process is required, use the ftlm_deobfuscate utility instead: 

ftlm_deobfuscate: Usage Message
  
  DESCRIPTION:
      Utility to deobfuscate and load checkouts that have been obfuscated by
      LicenseMonitor during situations where the product license was either
      unavailable, exceeded, or expired.
      
      If no file is specified, the utility automatically detects and
      deobfuscates all log files that contain obfuscated data.
  
  USAGE: 
      % ftlm_deobfuscate [OPTIONS]
  
  OPTIONS:
      -h                  -- Show this help.
      -v                  -- Increase verbosity.
      -do                 -- Perform deobfuscation and load data into DB.
      -k                  -- Specify license key file path.
                             Default is to search in the following order:
                             licmon.swd/license.lm.key
                             licmon.swd/license.key
                             VOVDIR/local/license.lm.key
      -show               -- Show files that are known to have obfuscated data.
  
  EXAMPLES:
      % ftlm_deobfuscate -do
      % ftlm_deobfuscate -show
      % ftlm_deobfuscate -do 2010.04.01
      % ftlm_deobfuscate -do 2010.04.*