Denials

To find out why license requests were refused, open Denials. The report records every failed attempt to check out a license, so you can analyze those failures by user, group, feature, server, and more. Use it to find licensing bottlenecks, investigate why requests were refused, and build the case for adding or reallocating licenses.

Before you begin

Confirm these prerequisites:

• To see the Management screens, you have the Software License Management Admin role, the Denials Admin role, or the Account Administrator role.
• To see the Reporting screens, you have the Software License Management Viewer role or the Denials Viewer role.

The Denials roles give access to this app only, as described in Role-based access control (RBAC).

To open Denials, select Navigation (the grid icon in the OpenLM Platform header), then Licenses and Features, then Denials.

The Denials app has four screens in two groups. The following table lists each screen, its group, and what it does:

Screen	Group	What it does
Denials	Reporting	The denial report table, the default view.
Denial Analysis	Reporting	The Denial Analysis BI dashboard, embedded in the app, on cloud deployments only.
General	Management	Controls which denials are recorded.
Excluded Denials	Management	Stops specific denials from being stored.

View denials

To review every recorded denial, select Reporting, then Denials. The report is a sortable, filterable table. Each row is one denial: a moment when a license request was refused, usually because no license was available.

You can group the historic denial occurrences by any dimension OpenLM Platform tracks, such as user, group, and feature.

The following image shows the Denials report table with the filter bar open.

The Denials report, with one row per denial and controls for filtering, sorting, and columns.

Denials table columns

Each denial can display the following columns:

Column	What it shows
Time	When the denial occurred
Feature Name	The licensed feature that was requested
Product Name	The product the feature belongs to
Server Name	The license server that handled the request
Vendor Name	The license manager or vendor daemon
License Type	The license model, for example Floating
Version	The requested software version
Additional Key	An additional license key, if any
Total Available Licenses	Licenses in the pool at the time of the request
User Name	The user whose request was denied
Workstation	The machine the request came from
Error	The error returned by the license manager
Group	The user's group

To show, hide, or pin columns, select the ⋮ icon at the end of the header row, then select Columns.

Filter the report

The following controls narrow what you see:

• Denials Time: Limit the report to a period. Select a preset (Last 7 Days, Last 30 Days, Last 60 Days, Last 180 Days, or Last 360 Days), or select Custom and pick a start and end date on the calendar.
• Show true denials only: Hide "false" denials, which are requests that one server refused but another server granted. See Configure which denials are recorded for how true denials are defined.
• Toggle Filters (funnel icon): Show or hide the filter bar. Select Add Filter, select Server Name, Vendor Name, or License Type, and pick one or more values to narrow the report.
• Search: Free-text search across the table.
• Refresh: Reload the data.

Use the pager at the bottom of the table to change the page size and move between pages.

Denial Analysis

To see denials summarized in charts instead of one row per denial, select Reporting, then Denial Analysis. This screen embeds the Denial Analysis BI dashboard, the same dashboard as Reporting Dashboard, then Denial Analysis on the Homepage. It is available on cloud deployments only. For what each chart and table in it shows, see Denial Analysis in the BI reports.

Configure which denials are recorded

To control which denials OpenLM Platform stores, select Management, then General. The following image shows the General settings.

General settings control which denials OpenLM Platform records.

The following settings are available:

• License Pull Tolerance (seconds): A grace window (default 60). If a user is denied on one server but pulls the same license from a different server within this interval, the initial denial is treated as false and is not counted as a true denial.
• Track True denials only: When selected, OpenLM Platform does not record a denial if the license was ultimately granted by a different pool or license server, and it drops false denials (per the License Pull Tolerance window). This is a global setting that applies to the whole Denials report. It affects new data only. Denials already in the database are not changed and might still contain false denials.

Select Save to apply your changes, or Cancel to discard them.

Exclude specific denials

Some denials are recurring license manager errors that you don't need to store. To create exclusion rules, select Management, then Excluded Denials. A denial is dropped when it matches a license server and a Major Error Code or Error Message you have registered for that server. A server with no error rules excludes nothing.

The screen has two panels:

• License servers: The license servers that have exclusion rules, each with its License Manager type.
• Error rules: The Major Error Code and Error Message rules for the selected server.

The following image shows the Excluded Denials screen with both panels.

Excluded Denials: select a server, then manage its error rules.

Add an exclusion rule

To add an exclusion rule:

1. Select + Add Exclusion.
2. In the Add Excluded Error dialog, enter the Major Error Code, the Error Message, or both, to match.
3. Select the License Server the rule applies to.
4. Select Save.

The following image shows the Add Excluded Error dialog.

The Add Excluded Error dialog.

After you save, OpenLM Platform doesn't store matching denials. To remove a rule, select it in the error rules panel, then select Delete.

About major error codes

The Major Error Code is the number your license manager returns with the denial. It's specific to that manager, not an OpenLM code. On FlexNet-based servers (Autodesk, Esri, and others), common codes are -4 (all available licenses in use), -15 (cannot connect to the license server), -10 (feature has expired), and -18 (server does not support this feature). Other managers such as DSLS, RLM, and Sentinel use their own.

Exclude the codes you don't need, such as connection errors, rather than genuine shortages such as -4, which you usually want to keep. Find the exact codes and messages to exclude in existing denial reports, database queries, or your license manager's documentation.

Related reports

See these related reports:

• Denial Analysis: BI dashboards that summarize denials by user and feature, with drill-through to a details table.
• Shadow denials: Capping events where OpenLM restricted usage under a shadow-license policy.
• What to do when you get a denial: Guidance for end users who hit a denial.