How To Procure Jenkins License

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To procure a Jenkins license, we should be aware of how many users are available in your Jenkins instance so that when we work with vendors i.e. Cloudbees we should give them the headcount of users for which we would like to procure the license. To do so, we make use of the available plugin called “User Activity Monitoring Plugin” This plugin monitors the activity of users on Jenkins. Either user authenticating to Jenkins or users contributing code changes that are being built by Jenkins.

How to install this plugin in Jenkins?

To install this plugin on your Jenkins you need to perform the following steps:-

Login to your Jenkins instance
Go to Manage Jenkins
Click on the Manage Plugin option
Click the Available tab
In the search bar search for the User Activity Monitoring plugin
Click on Install without restart to install the plugin
To check if the plugin is installed successfully you can refresh the page and then navigate to the Installed tab. Search if the plugin exists using the search bar

Plugin Usage

This plugin is useful to find the total number of users available in our Jenkins instance. This plugin gives us a clear understanding of the license by providing a dashboard summary of recent user activity. The best thing about this plugin is that this gives data in Comma-Separated Values (CSV) export files. This file consists of a username, user email address, last login details, and access type.

How to view users using this plugin

To view users using this plugin you need to perform the following steps:-

Go to Jenkins dashboard
Click on Manage Jenkins
Navigate to User Activity
The user count will be displayed

The following attachment will give you an idea of how this plugin helps in viewing different users.

Procedure

Once we get the count of users, we can then download the export and validate the outcome. Based on the output, we can then do the analysis if the users are still valid or not. If not we can remove the users from Jenkins itself and then retake the export using the plugin. And when the user validation is done we can then contact the vendor ie Cloudbees via email and ask them to schedule a call. In the meeting, you can then showcase to them the user count export which you have and then ask them to procure only for those users. This helps in getting the required license and we don’t get paid for an extra license amount.

Conclusion

Looking at the merits of the user activity monitoring plugin, we can get an accurate list of users, who are actively using the instance. This helps the organization to procure fixed licenses instead of ending up paying for extra license charges.