<< Click to Display Table of Contents >> Navigation:  Modules > Asset Management > Software License Management > Authorization Analyzer (Complex license types) > How it works

The Authorization Analyzer (AA) is part of the Housekeeping timed operation, which is usually set to run every five minutes.  Each time Housekeeping runs, it checks for any active authorizations against Managed Software List (MSL) titles that have an AA rule associated with them.  It takes the next batch and submits that batch to the AA for analysis.  AA writes the results of its analysis back to the individual authorization record after it has been analyzed.

The AA runs on a single authorization record at a time.  The authorization record against which the AA is running is called the "Authorization Under Test", or "AUT".  

The batch size is currently set to 100, meaning 100 authorizations which are governed by an AA rule will be processed during each Housekeeping run.  The records that have not been processed by the AA for the longest time are submitted first.

After each AUT is analyzed, the results of the rule are written back to the AUT record.  The primary result is the updated License Units Required, or LUR value.  This value represents how many licenses are required to cover the authorization that was analyzed.  Additional results written include the activity log and any confidence reduction that was encountered.

 

Which Rule is Used? (Important)

The AA will always apply the rule that has been assigned to the LICENSE that is has been allocated to cover the authorization.  The AA runs against an authorization, but it will use the rule assigned to the LICENSE.  If the authorization has not be covered by a license yet, then the rule for the authorization will be used.  The only time rules may differ is when an upbound license is being used (due to downgrade rights) to cover an older version authorization.  

 

Confidence Value

The AA was designed to tolerate missing input data elements.  Most rules are designed to use conservative defaults as substitutes for missing input values.  An example of a missing input value might be the number of cores for a given machine on which the software authorization being analyzed is loaded.  Such missing data elements are common.  Rule developers have the option of handling the "Else" case that results when a given AA function encounters missing data.  Most functions will return a reduced confidence value if the "Else" path is returned.  The cumulative confidence (which starts at 100% and is successively reduced as various "Else" paths are encountered during rule processing) is written back to the AUT record.  The confidence value is meant to represent the confidence in the LUR reported, since some of the data necessary to arrive at the exact result were not available.