What are some best practices for license management?

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When managing your licenses, we recommend these best practices for an optimal experience:

• License Rules
• Uninstrumented Applications
• Organization
• Naming Conventions and Matching Criteria
• Default Rules and Access Keys
• Additional Resources

License Rules

Creating license rules is not mandatory but it’s a feature that enables you to manage your licenses by specifying their allocation and distribution across all of your applications and machines. To learn about license rules and how they work, see our related article.

Uninstrumented Applications

When creating a rule, you can also add uninstrumented applications under the "Edit License Rule" → "Application Scope" section and unmonitored machines in the "Machine Scope" section. Later, when you install the agents to instrument these unmonitored applications and servers, they can use the licenses defined in the rule.

Organization

Organize license rules by:

• Teams/Modules (e.g., Inventory Services / Payments / Checkout / Order_Processing)
• Agent (e.g., .Net / Java / C++)
• Organization (for partners and consulting firms)

Naming Conventions and Matching Criteria

Plan naming conventions beforehand so you can use the matching criteria feature in "Application Scope" and "Server Scope" for creating rules. For example, teams can have their application and server names start with a specific prefix (e.g., Ecom_<AppName>).

Then, when setting up a license rule, use the "Include Applications/Machine matching the following criteria" → “<Starts with>” option. This feature lets you select multiple applications and machines using matching criteria. This is much more efficient than manually scrolling through all of your applications and machines to make your selections.

Default Rules and Access Keys

Keep a fixed pool of total licenses (e.g., 1000) and allocate them to the default rule and default access key. You can then create different license rules and access keys for agents to connect to the Controller, subtracting units from this default pool.

Additional Resources

For additional information on license management, review the following resources:

• How does AppDynamics license consumption work?
• What are license rules and how do they work?
• How do I view license usage on the subscriptions page?

Last Updated: 2/25/19