How to track SolidWorks network license utilization

[DeanD]

Neither the SolidWorks SolidNetWork License Manager or the CADAdmin Dashboard seems to have good tools to track a bevy of network licenses over time and their daily utilization. The SolidWorks SolidNetWork License Manager is most often even wrong when listing users.
I'm stumped, and so is my IT department, of how to gather and record this data.
Does a solution exist that allows the tracking and recording of how network seats are utilized?
Currently with 2023.

[mp3-250]

Nothing out of the box, try asking your VAR.
ours sell an add-in package with a snl log analyzer, but I think every big VAR has its own package of custom tools.

cad dashboard is broken for us since months, and it is completely useless at the moment.

[rodface]

We use OpenLM to manage all of our network licenses and it provides the sort of visibility that you are looking for.

[bnemec]

I wrote a tool that runs as a scheduled task on a server our CAD machines, it calls lmutils.exe, consumes and parses the output then stores that in a couple SQL tables. That' works well but the GUI I wrote to view the SQL data is crap. But it's the logs that we wanted to monitor license utilization.

edit: Not a scheduled task on CAD machines, it's a scheduled task on one server. I got my wires crossed, we have a scheduled task on the CAD machines that logs high memory and GDI usage from when we were having unbearable lags in the SW UI.

[rodface]

I wrote a tool that runs as a scheduled task on our CAD machines, it calls lmutils.exe, consumes and parses the output then stores that in a couple SQL tables. That' works well but the GUI I wrote to view the SQL data is crap. But it's the logs that we wanted to monitor license utilization.

That is a great solution as well if you do not have access to license management software. You can set your listener script to run on the usage interval that you want to monitor for usage, if you it is frequent enough to be effectively "live" then you can look at things like hours of usage per user, in fact I am just now looking at that data for an app in order to identify the heaviest usage.

[DeanD]

I wrote a tool that runs as a scheduled task on a server our CAD machines, it calls lmutils.exe, consumes and parses the output then stores that in a couple SQL tables. That' works well but the GUI I wrote to view the SQL data is crap. But it's the logs that we wanted to monitor license utilization.

edit: Not a scheduled task on CAD machines, it's a scheduled task on one server. I got my wires crossed, we have a scheduled task on the CAD machines that logs high memory and GDI usage from when we were having unbearable lags in the SW UI.

That does sound like a very creative and clever way to gain usage data. I would be quite interested in learning a bit more of this tool, and perhaps, how I could get my IT department to implement it as well.

[mp3-250]

That does sound like a very creative and clever way to gain usage data. I would be quite interested in learning a bit more of this tool, and perhaps, how I could get my IT department to implement it as well.

My understanding is that FlexLM log file parsing is a widely used method. we have a software from our VAR that does it and output nice graphs.