Features

The smallest unit for which usage can be captured is a feature. You define the feature or features that make up your products in FlexNet Operations, and your usage-capture code sends information about these features. In addition, feature-clipping code checks for the availability of certain features to determine a product’s functionality.

During execution, your capped-usage or feature-clipping code uses FlexNet licensing functions that attempt to acquire a license. The FlexNet licensing libraries validate such conditions as the feature not having expired. If the license acquisition succeeds, your code would then enable the corresponding capability.

For features intended to support usage management, you will also specify units and scale settings. Together, these settings allow you capture usage data in fine detail but report on usage counts with more manageable or meaningful numbers. Units define the label to be shown when usage data is reported. Scale is the factor by which the raw usage counts are divided. For example, if your usage-capture client tracks the time for which a feature is used in seconds but you want usage reports to show usage in minutes, you might set Units to “Minutes” and Scale to “60.” For more about features, see the exercise, Usage Management: Creating Features.