IBM Licensing Metric Tool (ILMT)

Verify Your IBM License Compliance Before an Audit Finds the Gaps

Learn how ILMT helps manage IBM software license compliance, where reporting gaps can create audit risk, and how ECCO’s experts can verify your deployment against contractual entitlements.

ILMT Help

Our expert analyst team can help determine if your ILMT reports are accurate by examining your IBM deployment and comparing it to your contractual entitlements. Do NOT approach your IBM reseller for help with ILMT, as they are contractually obligated to report any compliance violations to IBM.

ILMT Overview

  • ILMT – IBM License Metric Tool
  • Sub-capacity
  • ILMT Reporting

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IBM Audits

If you’re being audited by IBM, we’re here to help. ECCO has helped hundreds of IBM clients manage their audits over the last 20 years, saving them hundreds of millions of dollars in out-of-compliance costs. We’re so confident that we can help with your IBM audit that we provide a performance guarantee that your total cost savings will be greater than our fees.

ILMT Help

ECCO can help confidentially determine if your ILMT reports are accurate by having our IBM licensing experts examine your IBM deployment and compare it to your contractual entitlements. Do NOT approach your IBM reseller for help with ILMT, as they are contractually obligated to report any compliance violations to IBM. ECCO is completely independent of IBM and NOT an IBM reseller, and therefore can perform confidential “friendly” IBM audits to determine an organization’s compliance status before they are audited.

What is ILMT

The IBM License Metric Tool [ILMT] helps you maintain an inventory of the PVU based software deployed for your Full Capacity or Virtualization (Sub-) Capacity environment, and measures the PVU licenses required by software Product. It is intended to help you manage your IBM software licensing requirements, and help you maintain an audit-ready posture. Customers are responsible for supplying hardware and installation services required for installing the tool.

ILMT Advantages

IBM License Metric Tool also facilitates IT flexibility, operational optimization, and reducing cost across multiple platforms and virtualization technologies.

A summary of ILMT user benefits includes:

  • Sub-Capacity licensing – of IBM software with Processor Value Unit (PVU) and Resource Value Unit (RVU), depending on the defined Resource
  • Ongoing monitoring: – ILMT reports the high-water mark of usage during a quarter. For instance, if a customer experiences peak usage times and increases a two-core partition temporarily to four, ILMT will report the four cores as part of the quarterly audit report output. ILMT also performs the math involved with the PVU-based metric, which takes the number of cores, and multiplies it by the PVU per core measurement for that hardware type.
  • Software tracking for forecasting: – ILMT helps keep track of previous and current IBM software usage which can be useful in forecasting future needs and license purchases.

ILMT Challenges & Misconceptions

No software tool is perfect, and ILMT is no exception. While ILMT provides deployment information, the licensee confirms it reports accurately.

Among the other issues and misconceptions associated with ILMT:

  • ILMT deployment can be tricky. – Although ILMT is designed not to be resource-intensive, it requires software agent deployment and administration.
  • ILMT does not prevent IBM audits – Like most software vendors, IBM is an equal opportunity auditor. Deploying ILMT does not create a bulletproof shield that keeps IBM auditors away.
  • LMT does not track your every move – ECCO clients have expressed a fear that if they install ILMT, IBM knows everything in their environment. IBM’s auditors get deployment information from the ILMT quarterly reports submitted to them by customers during an audit. They do not enter the audit with your deployment information already in hand.

ILMT & License Compliance Failures

Many organizations that unintentionally violate IBM’s software licensing rules do so by either not installing ILMT, not installing ILMT correctly, or not running the required ILMT quarterly reports. These organizations hope the use of such a tool will resolve all of their software license compliance issues and concerns, and they no longer need to manage them. This is not true.

  • Limited Detection – No tool can identify all software products and correctly calculate their licensing requirements.
  • Rules and Policy Limitations – Many licensing rules cannot be calculated through the physical existence of the software
  • Hosting Restrictions – Many organizations have outsources some or all of their data centers to third-party hosting sites, which do not allow organizations to run tools within their environments
  • Security Restrictions – Due to heightened security requirements within many organizations, tools cannot reach all portions of the organization without requiring more tool collection points or importing files from other areas of the organizations into a centralized collection point.
  • Incomplete Scanning – Even though a tool may discover information, an organization is responsible for verifying the report is accurate. For various reasons, tools may miss or not have access servers that have the software, or misidentify or miscalculate deployments. There is no way to know unless the tool output is verified.