Changes to the Licensing Increment?

I am assisting another firm with their licensing setup. They are telling me that the licensing increment of 1 hour is being revised to 10 minutes.Can I get a definitive statement on this from Bentley.

Is the one hour increment still in effect or has the policy been changed?

TIA

  • Hey Daniel,

    I changed my posts with the conclusions after your corrections. The mechanism is still on the fair side. no real overlap = no count as "concurrent". Overlap up to 9 minutes can result as "no concurrent use" dependent on the situation. Overlap of 10 minutes or more are 100% concurrent.

    Only with Bentley hosted license server, not with all old products. First overusage counts for the quarter invoice now.
  • I have to amend what I said here because it, also, wasn't entirely accurate.  Counting does not start with the first full 10-minute window as I said previously.  Rather, counting will start with the second 10-minute window as long as the total duration of usage is greater than 10 minutes.  To state more explicitly what we're doing:

    1. We will look to see if the total duration is >10 minutes. 
      1. If it's not, we drop that record from the peak calculations. 
      2. If it is greater than 10 minutes, we move on to the next step
    2. We will then round the start time up to the beginning of the next 10-minute window and start counting the peak usage from that time.

    Take the example from above to illustrate:

    PC F: Usage from 7:22 - 7:39

    This usage is >10 minutes, so it will count for some usage.  The 7:20-7:30 window is not full, so 7:22 is rounded up to 7:30 leaving a usage record of 7:30-7:39.  For the purpose of counting peak usages in a window, we're left with 1 usage counted in the 7:30-7:40 window.  So, even though no 10-minute window was full, we do count usage in one of the windows because the total usage duration was greater than 10 minutes.  We will not count it as usages in 2 windows, though.

  • Very valuable and rich information. Thanks, Jeremy.

    I think this can be included into the licensing WIKI without change.
  • The following diagram posted on Bentley Communities shows the information transmitted to the hosted server. It receives the same data that client machines currently send to your deployed SELECTserver. No information is hashed since the hosted server needs the user and machine names to generate usage reports just like your deployed server.

    By default, client machines send usage information to the license server using the HTTP protocol which is not encrypted since deployed servers rarely are configured with an SSL certificate. However, the hosted server has one using 256-bit SHA-2 RSA encryption. So I highly recommend configuring clients to enable the "Use HTTPS (SSL)" checkbox in the License Management Tool when using the hosted server.

    The hosted server is based in a Microsoft Azure data center located in the United States. Note that our static IP address (191.237.154.77) was originally reserved for use in Brazil, but Microsoft has since repurposed it for use in the United States because of the shortage of available IPv4 addresses. While major geolocation services should show the correct location, some may show a discrepancy.

    The following support solution provides some additional information regarding the differences between a deployed server and Bentley's hosted server.



  • Jeremy,

    to be able to move to hosted selectserver, I need more background info like a full description of data transmitted from clients to Bentley, which of those are pseudonymized (hashed), the strength of encryptions, what choice of data centers we have where your service is running (region/country/provider) and so on.

    Can you give me a link to a Tech Note? I can only find such things for deployed server.

    I suggest you guys publish this in public since more (European) customers will be interested in that. Otherwise please give advice which category I should use in a service request. Thank you

    Bigean