I had a question about compliance reporting and with threshold changes as entitlements to products are reduced/increased.
We have a number of IBM products that were decomm’d and removed from our environment last year and I have been asked to set the entitlement thresholds to zero for these products, as we are not paying for the products any longer (as of 1/1/2020).
As far as historical reporting goes, changing these thresholds at any given time will alter the thresholds going back as far as our history goes. And this throws off the reporting if someone wants to look at a report from say June 2019.
Not sure if this is a best practice to do so? Or should the thresholds be left intact…as if the product(s) are not found on the target servers, they will not show in my subcapacity reports, as expected.
Threshold numbers are for your internal use, and as you’ve seen, don’t have any date information associated with them. That might be a good enhancement request.
In version 9.2.16, the “Declared Metric Quantity” data element was introduced, which does have a date component. However, it cannot be used to override the PVU/RVU metrics.
IBM uses the discovered metric quantities to validate against your license agreements. When you run a report that covers the period before and after the decommissioning, you should see the graph in the History column drop to zero, regardless of the threshold values you’ve set.
It’s fine to leave them in, but the threshold values may confuse others in your company, since the products have been uninstalled.
You may want to create a saved report that displays only the decommissioned products, and incorporate the Discovery End column in this one. It should correspond with the decommissioning date.
Also, check out what’s included in the Audit Snapshot for guidance as to what IBM will be looking for from your company: Contents of the Audit Snapshot
I opted to go with a zero threshold as suggested. Makes sense and as you mentioned, could cause confusion down the road if any one else is looking at this data.
Thank you for the tips. All this puts me at ease now. LOL
