Cisco Smart Software Licensing is a flexible software licensing model that streamlines the way you activate and manage Cisco software licenses across your organization. Smart Licenses provide greater insight into software license ownership and consumption, so that you know what you own and how the licenses are being used. The solution allows you to easily track the status of your license and software usage trends. It pools the license entitlements in a single account and allows you to move licenses freely across virtual accounts. Smart Licensing is enabled across most of the Cisco products and managed by a direct cloud-based or mediated deployment model.

Smart Licensing registers the Product Instance, reports license usage, and obtains the necessary authorization from Cisco Smart Software Manager (Cisco SSM) or Cisco Smart Software Manager On-Prem (Cisco SSM On-Prem).

You can use Smart Licensing to:

• View license usage and count.

• View the status of each license type and the product instance.

• View the product licenses available on Cisco SSM or Cisco SSM On-Prem.

• Register or deregister the Product Instance, renew license authorization and license registration.

• Sign in additional agents to Unified CCX up to the maximum limit that is configured in your OVA.

• Limit the license consumption up to the purchased quantity or allow the over consumption of the licenses by using the Overage Allowance. For more information on using Overage Allowance, see the Smart License Management section in Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Administration and Operations Guide.

License Control

Smart Licensing allows you to use more licenses than you’ve purchased. You’ll later be asked to deposit the additional licenses in the Smart Account. However, if you want to limit the license usage to the purchased quantity or less, use License Control. With License Control, you can disable the Overage Allowance option to restrict the number of agents and ports that can be used in Unified CCX. For different license types, you can restrict the usage of licenses and ports by configuring the following fields:

For more information about OVA Profiles, see the Server Capacities and Limits section in Solution Design Guide for Cisco Unified Contact Center Express.

Note	License Control is not applicable: For Non Production Systems License For License Reservation

Complete the following tasks to set up licensing after installing Unified CCX 12.5(1). For more information, see Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Admin and Operations Guide.

Complete the following tasks to set up the system licensing after upgrading to Unified CCX 12.5(1) from previous versions. For more information, see Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Admin and Operations Guide.

After you successfully register Smart Licensing, you can perform the following tasks as per the requirement:

• Renew Authorization—The license authorization is renewed automatically every 30 days. Use this option to manually renew the authorization.

• Renew Registration—The initial registration is valid for one year. Registration is automatically renewed every six months. Use this option to manually renew the registration.

• Reregister—Use this option to forcefully register the product instance again.

• Deregister—Use this option to release all the licenses from the current virtual account.

Renew Authorization and Renew Registration are automated tasks that take place at regular intervals. If there is a failure in the automated process, you can manually renew authorization and registration.

For more information, see Smart License Management section in Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Admin and Operations Guide.

Smart Licensing allows you to view the license consumption of your Cisco Unified CCX deployments. License consumption for an agent is computed as per the skills that are configured and log in status into the Finesse desktop. License consumption is recomputed every 8 hours. The aggregated data for all signed in agents is sent to Cisco SSM or Cisco SSM On-Prem at fixed time intervals and exists in the Unified CCX database. The license consumption details differ based on the system's license type. The following table lists the features available for Flex license type, and data sent to Cisco SSM or Cisco SSM On-Prem.

Real Time Monitoring Tool (RTMT) Alerts for Unified CCX

Administrators are notified by alerts (on the landing page of Unified CCX Administration and RTMT) and event logs (Sys logs). Administrators are also notified through emails (that are configured in Cisco SSM) on the status of licenses in the Smart and Virtual Accounts.

Unified CCX uses RTMT client to bring your attention to actions required to effectively manage your smart products and devices. For Smart Licensing, alerts are triggered in the following scenarios:

• Renew Authorization—Authorization Failure notification received/timeout

• Renew Registration—Renew ID cert failure notification received/timeout

• License Computation—Any exception when trying to compute license usage

• Entitlement Reporting—Failure to get license type or exception when trying to get entitlements from SDK

• System to enter in Out-of-Compliance (OOC)—Current state is OOC but OOC tolerance limit of 45 min is not breached

• System to enter in OOC shortly—System is in OOC state for more than 30 min and the OOC tolerance limit of 45 min is not breached. (System will enter OOC in the next interval of entitlement reporting)

• OOC—System in OOC and OOC tolerance limit of 45 min breached

• Enforcement Mode—System in enforcement mode

• Smart Agent Initialization—Exception when trying to initialize smart agent or Exception when trying to update transport settings or get entitlement tags

Devices (Product Instances of Unified CCX) that are registered with Smart Licensing have to share the license information with Cisco Smart Software Manager (Cisco SSM) at regular intervals. Customer deployments that cannot periodically share license utilization data with Cisco SSM due to regulatory reasons can use the Specific License Reservation feature. Specific License Reservation is available by default on the smart account.

You can reserve licenses (including add-on licenses) for your product instance on Cisco SSM. Use Unified CCX CLI to enable Specific License Reservation. For more information on the commands, see the Specific License Reservation Commands section in Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Administration and Operations Guide available at https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/customer-collaboration/unified-contact-center-express/products-maintenance-guides-list.html.

Note

You do not have to renew or reauthorize the reserved licenses unless there is a license usage change on the device. License reservation provides limited functionality to certain Smart Licensing features such as, transfer of licenses between products, license usage, and asset management. License Reservation reduces many of the benefits of Smart Licensing including: Dynamic movement of license consumption between products Real-time license usage visibility and asset management Simplified product registration

License Usage in Specific License Reservation

When an agent signs in, based on the skills that are configured (irrespective of the usage) in the Resource Configuration page in Unified CCX Administration, Flex Standard or Flex Premium license is consumed.

For example, if you have purchased a total of 50 licenses (10 Flex Premium and 40 Flex Standard), the following scenarios are allowed:

• A maximum of 10 Flex Premium agents can sign in.

• A maximum of 50 Flex Standard agents can sign in, if none of the Flex Premium agents have signed in.

• When 5 Flex Premium agents sign in, you can have a maximum of 45 Flex Standard agents sign in. Or when 45 Flex Standard agents sign in, you can have a maximum of 5 Flex Premium agents sign in.

• The total of Standard and Premium agents signed in should be 50.

  Note	Over-consumption of licenses is not allowed in Specific License Reservation.