Most of you receiving Tips will be well aware of the standard areas of Performance Management. Typically performance management software is used for tasks such as alerting, monitoring, analysis, trending, reporting and Capacity Planning.

Most products collect a wealth of data covering a large number of metrics. It is easy to get into a rut, just looking at certain issues, and missing the wider application of the data that is possible. One such area is licence management. organizations now have to ensure that they have their licence management fully under control, and many are actively seeking accreditation by FAST, the Federation Against Software Theft.

One of the most common concerns with licence management is the issue of concurrency. Software is licensed to contractually allow a legal maximum user concurrency. The software itself however has no security mechanism to prevent the organization unwittingly exceeding this limit. This could mean that by accident you break the law, or (increasingly with user-based charging) that you receive an unexpectedly high software bill from your supplier.

Good performance products can assist in this process. For example, Metron's Athene software, in common with many others, collects data concerning the number of concurrent users logged on to database software such as Oracle. This means that thresholds that match your licence entitlement can be set against the number of concurrent users. You can automatically receive a warning when you are reaching your limit or an alarm when it is exceeded.

Without adding an extra burden to your machine loading or use of staff time, you can use existing software to automatically provide you with information that could save you significant sums of money.