1. Proposed title of this feature request.

Software license/subscription usage monitoring  for commercial reporting

2. What is the nature and description of the request?

OpenShift should have the capability to report on the maximum number of vCPUs used across the cluster by a particular piece of software (Red Hat or any ISV)  and by a particular user(s) and/or cost centre(s) of that software over a given time period. An aggregate view, or the ability to create one, is also required. This capability needs to operate in a disconnected mode.

3. Why does the customer need this? (List the business requirements here)

Maintaining compliance to legal contracts is essential for any business. Large parts of the software industry use the vCPU or core as the measure within the commercial contract between them and the customer.  In "static" or non-elastic platforms it is relatively straight forward to know consumption but in an elastically scalable platform the customer may want to allow for a variable number of cores to be used as the number of pods running the application scales up and down.

In a large scale enterprise software licences or support subscriptions may be shared across many departments. Ideally, peak usage by one department co-responds to minimum usage by another creating efficiencies.  The IT team responsible for the contract with the ISV has to aggregate usage by departments and be able to demonstrate compliance with commercial terms.

It is also common for the IT team to re-charge departments to recover the costs spent with ISVs. End user departments appreciate "fair share" allocations and the business as a whole appreciates being able to link costs with associated revenues and profits.

While it may be possible to construct solutions using existing tooling it would be beneficial to have this as an in-built feature of OpenShift. Such a feature would be a clear business benefit to senior operations staff responsible for legal compliance:

• compliance to contracts & thus reduction of legal risk
• save labour effort in managing software usage commercials
• identify over-provisioning to enable re-negotiation of  contracts at renewal

and to the business

• clearer audit trail between software costs and business value