TLDR Answer: Pretty easy if you put in a couple hours to learn basic JavaScript

Why use custom license metrics?

Publisher Packs and Common Metrics account for the majority of a customers environment and software spend, but sometimes smaller publishers have their own unique licensing. This is where creating custom license metrics fill the gap. The information we’ll need to create a custom license metric is the publisher license definition and some basic JavaScript knowledge.

Example

Shank posted a question on the community forum looking for help with a custom license metric and I thought what better way to understand the custom license metric functionality than by helping a customer. Shank was trying to license the publisher Cohesity with a product licensed based on the storage size of the device to the terabyte (TB). By googling "Cohesity" and "terabyte licensing" I was able to identify the license definition from the Publisher which enables me to whiteboard the license logic.

Steps

1. Navigate to Software Asset > Administration > Custom License Metrics
2. Select New
3. Input License Metric name
4. Whiteboard license logic
   
   • When a software installation of the product is found count the disk space of the computer to the nearest terabyte in the cmdb_ci_computer table
     
   • Since the computer disk space value is in GB we'll need to convert it into TB by dividing by 1000
5. Code your logic in JavaScript
6. * getrights();
   
   • function getrights(){
     
   • var rights = -1;
     
   • var device = new GlideRecord('cmdb_ci_computer');
     
   • if(device.get(entity)){rights = device.getValue('disk_space');
     
   • }
     
   • return rights/1000;
     
   • }
     
   • 
7. Discover Software Installs
8. * We manually imported two installs of Cohesity DataProtect using import sets and transform maps
   
   • Video link (3min) on importing data and normalization
9. Create a Software Model
10. * Publisher = Cohesity
    
    • Product = DataProtect
      
    • Version = Anything
      
    • Edition = Anything
11. Create a Software Entitlement
12. * Software Model = Cohesity DataProtect
    
    • Metric Group = Custom
      
    • License Metric = Per 1TB Capacity
13. Run Reconciliation
14. Results
15. * Pic 1 - License Workbench showing Cohesity DataProtect licensed by Per 1TB Capacity having two installs being counted toward the license amount. 4 rights are consumed by Server-A and 1 right consumed by VM-A.Pic 2 - Shows Server-A computer details having a disk space of 3,500GB. 3,5000GB is equivalent to 3.5 terabytes which is then rounded to the nearest whole terabyte of 4.

Disclaimer: This blogpost and script is solely for demonstration purposes. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of ServiceNow.