About License Manager

License Manager lets you subscribe, manage, and track your third-party license usage on Google Cloud. As an administrator, you can use License Manager to offer per-user licensing products, like Microsoft Office, to your users with no long-term commitments and no overhead of managing compliance.

License Manager is available as part of a preview program. To enable License Manager in the Google Cloud console, contact license-manager-onboarding@google.com.

Key benefits

License Manager offers the following key benefits of managing your third-party licenses on Google Cloud:

  • Streamlined procurement: License Manager offers some of the most common per-user licenses, like Microsoft Office, directly from Google Cloud without the hassle of negotiating yet another vendor contract. Configure licenses in just a few clicks, and you are ready to begin using your applications.

  • Cost flexibility: for per-user licenses, you can scale up whenever you need more licenses and scale back the next month when you don't need as many licenses, to optimize costs. The License Manager dashboard offers insights into how many licenses have been consumed and your remaining license count for the month.

  • Simplified reporting: Google Cloud handles all the necessary license tracking and reporting to third-party software vendors, so you can focus on your work instead of complex reporting requirements.

How does License Manager work?

The two main components of License Manager — the License Configuration and the License Manager agent — work together to authenticate, activate, and monitor the per-user licenses installed on your virtual machines.

  • License Configuration: stores the information for the licensed application, region, and number of licenses you want to authorize.

  • License Manager agent: handles any necessary activation of the software directly to the third-party vendor from your virtual machine (VM) instance. Since some third-party licenses are based on the number of users who access the software in a given time period, the agent also ensures an accurate count of licenses consumed from your License Configuration.

In the License Manager dashboard, administrators with access can review the number of active licenses across their organization and scale up or down the number of licenses needed each month.

Supported licensing products

License Manager supports Microsoft Office LTSC 2021 Professional Plus.

Limitations

The following limitations apply to License Manager:

  • License Manager supports VMs running only on Compute Engine.

  • License Manager supports a default of 5000 licenses per license configuration. To request an increase in quota, contact license-manager-onboarding@google.com.

  • License Manager supports one license configuration per product per region. You cannot have multiple license configurations for the same product in the same region.

  • License Manager is supported by the following regions:

    • asia-south1
    • asia-southeast1
    • australia-southeast1
    • australia-southeast2
    • europe-west2
    • europe-west3
    • us-central1
    • us-east4

    If you don't see the region you need in this list, reach out to license-manager-onboarding@google.com for more information.

Get started with License Manager

To use licenses configured by License Manager, do the following:

  1. Enable the License Manager API
  2. Create a License Configuration in Google Cloud console
  3. Install and activate the License Manager agent on a VM

Before you begin

Ensure that you have the Identity and Access Management role Service Account User to enable APIs in your project. For more information, see Grant an IAM role by using the Google Cloud console.

Enable the License Manager API

To enable the License Manager API, follow these steps:

  1. Open the APIs & Services page in Google Cloud console.

    Go to the APIs & Services page

  2. Click Enable APIs & Services.

  3. Choose License Manager API with the service name licensemanager.googleapis.com.

  4. Click Enable.

Create a License Configuration

For some licensing products, your billing obligation begins immediately upon the creation of the license configuration. For information on each product's billing considerations, see Supported licensing products.

To create a new license configuration using Google Cloud console, follow these steps:

  1. Open the License Manager page in Google Cloud console.

    Go to the License Manager page

  2. Click Create License Configuration.

  3. Enter a Name for your configuration.

  4. Select a Location for your configuration.

  5. Choose the Product you want to associate with the license. For an up-to-date list of supported products, see Supported licensing products. Note that you can only have one license configuration per product per region.

  6. Enter the total Number of Licenses you want to enable.

  7. Confirm the information you entered is accurate by clicking the confirmation checkbox.

  8. Click Create to finalize your license configuration.

Install the License Manager agent

Each VM with a license enabled by License Manager requires the License Manager agent installed to enable accurate authentication and activation.

For the latest location of the License Manager agent, contact license-manager-onboarding@google.com.

To install the License Manager agent, open a Powershell terminal on your VM and do the following:

  1. Add the googet repository:

    googet addrepo  google-cloud-license-manager-agent-windows-x86-64
https://packages.cloud.google.com/yuck/repos/google-cloud-license-manager-agent-windows-x86-64

  2. Run the install command for the License Manager agent:

    googet install google-cloud-license-manager-agent

  3. Edit and validate the configuration file:

    Installing the License Manager agent creates a folder in C:\Program Files\Google\google-cloud-license-manager-agent containing agent-related files. You will need to edit this configuration file with the name of the products you want to activate.

    The following is the content of a configuration file for activating Microsoft Office 2021 Professional Plus:

    {
  "log_level": "INFO",
  "log_to_cloud": true,
  "products":
    [
      {
        "name": "Office2021ProfessionalPlus",
        "source_path": "C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office"
      }
    ]
}

    If your VM is using multiple products enabled by License Manager, you will need to add each product to the configuration file.

  4. Verify that the file is formatted correctly by running the validate_config command:

    & 'C:\Program Files\Google\google-cloud-license-manager-agent\google-cloud-license-manager-agent.exe' validate_config

  5. Restart the agent for the changes to take effect:

    Restart-Service -Name 'google-cloud-license-manager-agent' -Force

  6. Run the activate command for your product:

    & 'C:\Program Files\Google\google-cloud-license-manager-agent\google-cloud-license-manager-agent.exe' activate Office2021ProfessionalPlus

    For some licensing products like Microsoft Office LTSC, Microsoft requires that these licenses activate directly against Microsoft servers over the internet. For information on whether the VM needs internet access for activation, see the product's page in Supported licensing products.

To confirm that the activation was successful, open any Microsoft Office application on your VM and do these steps:

  1. Click File to open the menu.
  2. Click Account.

If the license activation was successful, you should see Product Activated.

Manage your licenses

After creating a license configuration, you can control the number of licenses you need by increasing or decreasing the license count, or deactivating the license configuration entirely. Deactivated licenses can be reactivated within 90 days.

Increase or decrease your license count

Some licenses are billed by the calendar month in which they are active. This means that increases to license count take effect immediately, but decreases or deactivations take effect in the next calendar month. For information on how each license is billed, see the product's page in Supported licensing products.

To change the total license count for a license configuration, follow these steps:

  1. Open the License Manager page in Google Cloud console.

    Go to the License Manager page

  2. From the menu, click Edit License Volume.

  3. Enter a new license volume amount.

  4. Click Confirm for the new license volume to take effect.

Deactivate a license configuration

You can see deactivated licenses on the License Manager page. The status of a deactivated license is shown as Inactive. These license configurations remain visible for 90 days before they are permanently deleted.

When you no longer need licenses in a particular region, you can deactivate the license configuration using the following steps:

  1. Open the License Manager page in Google Cloud console.

    Go to the License Manager page

  2. On the license configuration you want to deactivate, click Actions to show additional options.

  3. From the menu, click Deactivate License Configuration.

  4. Click Confirm to deactivate the license configuration.

Reactivate a license configuration

You can reactivate a deactivated license configuration using the following steps:

  1. On the license configuration you want to reactivate, click Actions to show additional options.
  2. From the menu, click Reactivate License Configuration
  3. Click Confirm to reactivate the license configuration.

License configurations that were previously active in the current calendar month will default to the previous license count. Otherwise, the reactivated license configuration defaults to a license count of 0. After reactivation, you can change the license count by using the steps mentioned in Increasing or decreasing your license count.

Uninstall the License Manager agent

To begin uninstallation, you must first deactivate your licensing products:

  1. In a Powershell terminal with Administrator mode, use the deactivatecommand to deactivate the product:

    & 'C:\Program Files\Google\google-cloud-license-manager-agent\google-cloud-license-manager-agent.exe' deactivate Office2021ProfessionalPlus

  2. Uninstall the agent with the following command:

    googet remove google-cloud-license-manager-agent

Agent logging

The License Manager agent supports both local and cloud-based logs using Cloud Logging in the Google Cloud console.

Local Logging

Local logs are located in the folder C:\Program Files\Google\google-cloud-license-manager-agent\logs.

Each log file has a maximum size of 25 MB before a new one is created. There are at most 3 log files that exist at a time. Once this limit is reached, the oldest log file will be deleted.

Cloud-based logging using Logging

If enabled, you can see cloud-based logs using the following steps:

  1. Open the Logs Explorer page in Google Cloud console.

    Go to the Logs Explorer page

  2. Click All Resources.

  3. From the menu, click GCP Location and then click Global.

  4. Click Apply.

  5. In the query editor, enter google-cloud-license-manager-agent.

  6. Click Run query.

You should see the logs generated by the agent instances running on all your VM instances. To filter the logs from a specific machine, use the filters available in the interface.

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