How is licensing measured for BAW on CP4BA, and how do I check the License Service usage?

Question

On premises we count PVUs per server. With the Cloud Pak the sales team talks about VPCs and the License Service. What exactly is metered for Workflow on CP4BA and how do I see our current usage?

Answer 1

Cloud Pak for Business Automation is licensed by Virtual Processor Cores (VPC) of the pods that carry a license annotation; the IBM License Service (part of the foundational services) measures the CPU limits / requests of those pods per hour and keeps the peak per month. Workflow counts the workflow server / authoring pods (and their PFS, Workplace parts as documented per version); databases outside the cluster, OpenShift itself and the operator do not count. Ratios between capabilities (e.g. Workflow vs Content) are defined in the license terms - the License Service already applies them and reports "CP4BA VPCs".

# current and historical usage (cluster-admin or license-service role)
oc get route -n ibm-licensing | grep ibm-licensing-service-instance
TOKEN=$(oc get secret ibm-licensing-token -n ibm-licensing -o jsonpath='{.data.token}' | base64 -d)
curl -sk "https://<licensing-route>/products?token=$TOKEN"                   # products and peak VPC per month
curl -sk "https://<licensing-route>/snapshot?token=$TOKEN" -o snapshot.zip   # audit snapshot for IBM (keep 2 years)
# per pod: the annotation that makes a pod licensed
oc get pod icp4adeploy-bawins1-baw-server-0 -o jsonpath='{.metadata.annotations}' | tr ',' '\n' | grep productMetric

Practical points: pod limits drive the count on most releases (set them consciously, question on sizing applies); non-production environments count unless licensed as such (production / non-production is a term of the entitlement, not a technical flag); the same entitlement covers ODM, ADS, Content, RPA and BAI, so moving a workload between capabilities does not change the pool; Workflow Process Service and the SaaS tenant are user-based instead. Keep the monthly License Service snapshots - they are the audit evidence.

References

• CP4BA documentation - licensing and the License Service