Development of a Monitoring Tool for Software Licenses

The purpose of this report is to present the content of my project as a summer student at CERN during the summer of 2021. I participated as a Non-Member State and was assigned to the IT 1 department for this program. Software license management gives the transparency into the enterprise’s software assets, usage, licenses, and contracts so that administrators and users can understand what software is being used, how much, where and by whom. However, without managing licenses for big sized organizations can cost time and money. It can also hinder productivity and efficiency. IT administrators or software asset managers may find it challenging to track products installed on numerous devices across a network. They run the risk of purchasing too many licenses then needed. Also, The Application and Devices (AD) section provides over 100 engineering applications [1] used by the technicians, engineers, and physicists at CERN to design and implement the different components that are used to carry out the accelerators and experiments work. Such a large portfolio of applications also entails a large set of licenses that need to be maintained and monitored to give information to users about their current status. In that stage our solution attempt to answer this following problem, How can we manage a complex system efficiently of a large number of engineering tools, users holding licenses and users request licenses? In order to answer to this problem will need a tool that monitors and report on engineering tool licenses and usage across the organization. Therefore, my project consists of developing a monitoring tool for software licenses, It is a web application called Licmon built for tracking and facilitate the resolution of license shortage incidents. The main objectives of this application are. First, to maintain an organized software license with detailed information on all engineering tools, including, contracts, and license types. This helps users stay informed of all available software. Second, to Stay updated on license usage and expiration to prevent unnecessary spending on unused licenses and maintain compliance. Next, to provide admins with statistics about licenses and their status. Also, to allow users to request licenses by sending an automatic e-mail that describes their requests.