AWS License Manager FAQs

License Manager provides you with the flexibility and control to manage license and subscription usage to match your organizational structure and processes. License Manager can be set in different configurations to address specific business needs. Here are four steps to get started with License Manager:

1. Define licensing rules: Administrators work with the relevant stakeholders (for example, business or compliance teams) in your organization to carefully review licensing agreements, and create licensing rules in License Manager. Licensing rules contain settings that are configured to reflect the terms of your enterprise agreement.
2. Enforce licensing rules: After rules are created, they can be applied in several different ways to track license usage and compliance. Administrators can attach the rules to the organization’s specific Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), create AWS CloudFormation templates, use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) launch templates, or attach them to applications in the AWS Service Catalog. After the rules are created and attached to the relevant instances to be deployed, end users in your organization can launch AWS resources such as Amazon EC2 instances with the certainty they are licensed correctly. Administrators can track usage through License Manager’s built-in dashboard. License Manager flags any resources that are not compliant with the predefined rules.
3. Discover usage of software installed on AWS and on-premises environments: License Manager integrates seamlessly with AWS Systems Manager, helping discovery of any software installed on your AWS resources. With Systems Manager, you can manage instances running on AWS and in your on-premises data center through a single interface. Systems Manager securely communicates with a lightweight agent installed on your servers to initiate management tasks. This helps you manage resources for Windows and Linux operating systems running on EC2 or on-premises. After the instances are attached to License Manager, administrators can search for any operating system or application software through a single pane across AWS resources and on-premises servers. You can apply your licensing rules to the discovered software and track all the applications through the built-in dashboard.
4. Discover and track commercial Linux subscriptions: Onboard to License Manager Linux subscriptions to get information subscriptions associated with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), and Ubuntu Pro. Discovery is via instance metadata and does not require use of AWS Systems Manager. Use License Manager settings to configure cross account and cross region discovery from within a single account, and delegate another account to act as a License administrator. Connect License Manager with Red Hat Subscription Manager (RHSM) to get detailed information on RHEL use, and see when an instance has more than one subscription defined.

With License Manager, you can track software that is licensed based on virtual cores (vCPUs), physical cores, sockets, or number of instances. This includes a variety of software products from vendors including Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and SAP. Common use cases include tracking Oracle databases, Microsoft Windows Servers, and SQL Server licenses that can be licensed by physical and virtual cores. You can discover and track commercial Linux subscriptions in use on AWS with RHEL, SLES, and Ubuntu Pro subscription included (SI) or AWS Marketplace instances.

AWS License Manager supports Amazon, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), AWS Marketplace, and Systems Manager (includes support for on-premises environments and AWS Cloud). You can use License Manager to track licenses and subscriptions across your EC2 instances using default tenancy, Dedicated Instances, Dedicated Hosts, Spot Instances, Spot Fleet, and Auto Scaling groups.

You can use License Manager to track licenses for your IBM DB2 BYOL workloads, and Oracle database engine editions, options, and packs as you grow your database footprint on RDS.

Yes. You can use License Manager along with AWS Systems Manager Agent to track licenses outside of AWS, including licenses for on-premises servers.

License Manager integrates with AWS Organizations seamlessly. Administrators can sign in to their organizational management account and link all their organizational accounts. They can manage and control license and subscription usage centrally using the management account.

License Manager helps you associate licensing rules to AWS Marketplace BYOL AMI products and benefit from centralized license management tracking and compliance. License Manager doesn’t change the way you obtain or activate your BYOL AMIs in AWS Marketplace. For example, if you launch an EC2 instance, you provide the license key obtained directly from the seller to activate the software.

License Manager reduces the risk of non-compliance by increasing transparency, and enforcing and tracking licensing rules that administrators define. License Manager provides built-in dashboards that can be used when considering new license purchases, reporting to procurement, and in vendor audits. However, customers are responsible for compliance and assume the responsibility of carefully understanding and adding rules into License Manager based on their licensing agreements. While AWS cannot participate in audits, License Manager’s rich report provides valuable insights that help attain more accuracy and transparency.

When you purchase software licenses in AWS Marketplace, you can track them in License Manager managed entitlements. You can distribute different tiers of licenses to different groups of users (for example, business units) you create in the software, whenever tiered licenses are available from supported vendors.

Yes, you can use managed entitlements with other AWS services such as AWS Service Catalog to simplify deployments and governance of licensed software. This also applies to third-party software licenses purchased in AWS Marketplace, which are automatically created in License Manager. You can use managed entitlements with Identity and Access Management (IAM) or with AWS accounts to control which workloads and users can use those licenses.

When you purchase licenses from participating independent software vendors (ISVs) in AWS Marketplace, you can extend license management across both AWS Cloud accounts and on-premises environments. You can pay for software licenses through AWS Marketplace, and then manage distribution and track entitlements using managed entitlements.

Yes, you can turn on the AWS Organizations integration in License Manager. Using the management account, you can now view all licenses distributed to identities in your AWS Organization across all AWS Regions. You can see detailed information about each license, including the expiration date and software capabilities. You also get metrics showing how much of the license is consumed by each identity.

You can onboard directly through License Manager by creating a public and private key pair through the console or application programming interface (API). License information returned by the API operations is signed with your private key and you can use the public key to verify the signature. Using AWS License Manager’s API operations, you can integrate with your sales order system to create licenses for customers after their purchase and update licenses after renewals. You can also use the API operations to migrate existing licenses from your current system to AWS License Manager. You will need to modify your software to call the API operations to verify a customer’s license before provisioning software capabilities. To simplify integration with the APIs, use the API operations, use AWS SDK.

Yes. License Manager helps you enforce license use by tracking the number of software capabilities customers are using against the amount they are entitled. License Manager tracks usage across all of the customer identities with access to the licenses. When customers stop using your software, they can return the licenses back to the pool and make them available for reuse through the API operations or let the licenses expire automatically.

You can use License Manager to assign licenses to users. For example, a customer might want to give a license with more capabilities to power users, and a different license to the average user. You can enable this by mapping your users to  IAM roles with Amazon Cognito, and then using License Manager to distribute the licenses to those users by specifying their associated IAM roles.

Customers do not have to use AWS Identity with their on-premises applications. You can use License Manager to create a unique short lived token to identify the customer to whom you are giving a license. Next, share this token with the customer. When they launch your software, the customer enters the token to activate the license. Your software should pass the short lived token to the API operations and exchange it for a long lived customer identifier that you use in API calls. For on-premises workloads that do not have an internet connection, you can generate a license file unique to the host that customers can use to run your software on that host.

You can get started with automated discovery by specifying the product information along with licensing rules in License Manager. Product information might include the name of the software, the publisher, and the version, which tells License Manager how to detect installed software.

Consider having an organization-wide tagging strategy that can help you organize your resources, allocate cost, automate processes, control access, and manage security risk. If you are new to tagging, review AWS recommended tagging best practices to learn how to set up and search using tags.

Yes, you can search instances running AWS license Included software.

Yes, you can combine a tag-based search with other search filters that License Manager supports. Other search filters include names of operating systems and applications, whether they are license Included or not, or AWS account IDs, and resource IDs.

Automated discovery helps you track all instances as you install software. If software is specified in automated discovery rules, the instances will automatically get tracked by License Manager. Once you uninstall software,  License Manager will automatically stop tracking those instances and make the licenses available to you for reuse.

Yes, you need to opt in. You can opt in by specifying a simple setting in automated discovery thatwill ask License Manager to stop tracking an instance when applications are uninstalled. See the documentation.

If you install the software again, License Manager’s automated discovery capability will detect it and account for the license usage again.

If your licenses are node-locked to a physical server, you can use License Manager’s license affinity property where you can specify the time period for which your licenses need to be node-locked. License Manager will continue to account for the usage until the license affinity period has elapsed, even if you uninstall your software.

Here are steps to get started. For more information on the prerequisites, see our
documentation.

• Step 1: Configure AWS Directory Service for Microsoft Active Directory.
• Step 2: Subscribe to a product in AWS Marketplace or the EC2 Console.
• Step 3: Launch an instance.
• Step 4: Associate users to an instance.
• Step 5: Connect to a user-based subscription instance

AWS will bill you through a monthly subscription, based on the number of users associated with the license included Microsoft Office or Visual Studio instances. These per-user charges are billed per calendar month, and the billing starts from the time you subscribe to the product. If you remove access to a user during the existing month, you will be billed for the user for the remainder of the month. You will stop incurring charges for the user the following month.

No, a user is only counted once. You get charged per user for Microsoft Office and Visual Studio, irrespective of the number of EC2 instances the user connects. However, Windows Server licenses are bundled with the EC2 instances and are charged per vCPU along with the instance charges.

All EC2 instances that are Nitro based support license included Microsoft Office and Visual Studio.

Linux subscriptions in AWS License Manager helps you view and manage commercial Linux subscriptions that your Amazon EC2 instances use. You can track utilization of your Linux subscriptions for the AWS Regions and accounts in AWS Organizations that you have defined in your settings. License Manager gives you a comprehensive view of your running instances that use Linux subscriptions.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), RHEL Bring Your Own Subscription model (BYOS) with the Red Hat Cloud Access Program, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and Ubuntu Pro.

To get started with Linux subscriptions you must visit License Manager settings to configure the regions in which you want to discover and track subscriptions. You can opt to aggregate subscription data across your accounts in AWS Organizations. Initial discovery will complete within 36 hours after which you should see discovered subscriptions and instances.

RHSM discovery uses data from Red Hat Subscription Manager to discover RHEL instances on AWS. RHSM discovery helps you discover RHEL instances that do not have metadata to identify them, such as bring your own subscription (BYOS) instances based on custom images. Activating RHSM discovery provides more detailed information about RHEL BYOS instances such as Red Hat release version and gives you a consolidated view of all your RHEL instances in use on AWS. You can activate RHSM discovery in Linux subscriptions settings.

To see usage of Linux subscriptions and setup notifications based on thresholds, look at the subscriptions view of the subscription you are interested in. There you can see usage over time and create alarms based on thresholds you set. Alarms are set as AWS Cloud Watch notifications so you receive them in the same way you do other notifications.

Yes, you can use either the License Manager Console or the AWS CLI to convert the license type of eligible Ubuntu LTS instances. Instances must be stopped and associated by AWS Systems Manager Inventory. See License Manager documentation for more information about Ubuntu LTS license conversion.

There is no additional charge for using License Manager. You pay for only the resources created in your account. These include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances but can also include an Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket for storing software based on AWS Systems Manager. It can also include Amazon Athena queries, and AWS Glue jobs for enabling the centralized discovery of the Systems Manager data, and Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) notifications.