Monitor licenses that are about to end

Monitoring for licenses that are approaching their end date is a very typical use of the ERM Licenses widget. However the exact details of when you'd want to be notified of expiring licenses may depend on your local needs. For example, you may wish to know there are licenses that expire within the next 3 months, or those that expire in the next 30 days, or both! In all cases the "ERM Licenses" widget definition would be used.

Licenses with an end date in the next thirty days

To start with a widget could be configured to list all licenses that expire in the next thirty days:

  1. Navigate to the Dashboard app, and click the Actions button (top right) and select "New"
  2. In the "Widget name" enter "Licenses expiring <30 days"
  3. In the "Widget definition" dropdown select "ERM Licenses"
  4. Click "Add filter" and from the "Filter by" dropdown select "End date"
  5. In Filter 1, Rule 1:
    1. change the "Comparator" to "on or before"
    2. change the date settings so they read "30 days after today". This sets a filter to only show licenses that have an end date that is before the date thirty days from the current date i.e. if it is the 1st December 2021 today, it will only show licenses with an end date that is before 31st December 2021 (1st December + 30 days). The widget keeps track of the current date, so there is never any need to re-configure this filter once it has been created - whenever you look at the dashboard it will always take the current date as "today" for this calculation
  6. By itself this rule would include all licenses that had ended in the past (as any date in the past is also before "today+30 days"), so to avoid including many expired licenses another filter is required. Click the "Add filter" button again and from the "Filter by" dropdown select "End date" again
  7. In Filter 2, Rule 1:
    1. change the "Comparator" to "on or after"
    2. change the date setting so they read "0 days after today". This sets the filter to only show licenses that have an end date that is after todays date ("0 days after today" is today!)
  8. The filters are now set, so now select the columns that should be displayed in the widget. Scroll to the bottom of the widget configuration form and click the "Add column" button four times. This will add four columns to the display, all initially set to "License name"
    1. Leave the first as "License name", change the second one to "Status", the third to "Type" and the fourth to "End date" by selecting the values from the dropdown menu
    2. You could decide to add other or different columns to your display depending on your requirements. You can also change the label used for each column if you do not want to use the default value which is added when you select the Column from the dropdown
  9. Finally, click "Save and close" to save the widget configuration and display the widget on the dashboard

Variations

If you want to be notified of Licenses further in advance of their end date, you could change the first filter to use a larger number of days, weeks, months or even years! For example changing the filter to "60 days after today" would mean the widget displayed those licenses expiring within 60 days, rather than 30 days.

To make sure the widget shows the licenses that are expiring soonest at the top of the widget, you could change the "Sort by" parameters in the results display to be "End date" and the sort direction "asc" (ascending). This will show the license with the earliest end date first when you view the widget.

You could also have multiple widgets configured to highlight licenses expiring in different time periods. For example, you could configure three widgets, one showing licenses expiring in the next three months, one showing licenses expiring in the next two months, and one showing licenses expiring in the next month. Depending on how you configure the second part of the date filter (which is set to "on or after 0 days after today" in the example above) these three widgets could either overlap (with licenses expiring in the next month appearing in all three filters) or be exclusive (each license appears in only one of the widgets) as following:

Overlapping widgets

  1. Widget 1 (Licenses expiring in <3 months)
    1. Filter 1: End date on or before 3 months after today
    2. Filter 2: End date on or after 0 days after today
  2. Widget 2 (Licenses expiring in <2 months)
    1. Filter 1: End date on or before 2 months after today
    2. Filter 2: End date on or after 0 days after today
  3. Widget 3 (Licenses expiring in <1 month)
    1. Filter 1: End date on or before 1 months after today
    2. Filter 2: End date on or after 0 days after today

Exclusive widgets

  1. Widget 1 (Licenses expiring in 2-3 months)
    1. Filter 1: End date on or before 3 months after today
    2. Filter 2: End date on or after 2 months after today
  2. Widget 2 (Licenses expiring in 1-2 months)
    1. Filter 1: End date on or before 2 months after today
    2. Filter 2: End date on or after 1 months after today
  3. Widget 3 (Licenses expiring in <1 month)
    1. Filter 1: End date on or before 1 months after today
    2. Filter 2: End date on or after 0 days after today