SAP Analytics Cloud – Removing Concurrent Session licenses and other updates around managing licenses with roles and teams

The article I published back in March 2020 about SAP Analytics Cloud – Managing Licenses with Roles and Teams has remained entirely valid since then and I’ve only recently found the need to update it.

The updates are needed because of improvements made to SAP Analytics Cloud and the fact that some customer are starting to move away from Business Intelligence Concurrent Session licenses.

[Update October 2022: the following is no longer applicable because of improvements made to SAP Analytics Cloud. It means you should ignore the following in strikethrough]

If action isn’t take it could mean users will not be able to log-on to SAP Analytics Cloud once the concurrent session licenses have been removed. 

The update includes a good of points and in particular:

• • Important tasks you need to perform either before or after Business Intelligence Concurrent Session licenses are removed. This is to ensure all your users can log-on to SAP Analytics Cloud after those licenses have been removed. There are two scenarios:
    • A regular contract change resulting in the concurrent session licenses being removed where the SAP Analytics Cloud Service remains otherwise unchanged
    • A platform migration from ‘NEO’ to ‘Cloud Foundry’. Here the underlying Service is different and the contents are migrated by SAP.

Both scenarios show slightly different behaviour for the users that log-on after either of these ‘events’. The good news is, both are very temporary issues and are expected to be fully resolved with SAP Analytics Cloud wave version 2022.3. Until then the article has all the details you need to avoid any surprises and allow your users to log-on.

• Links to my SAP Analytics Cloud SCIM API Sample Scripts to help update users, or teams of users, with a different Business Intelligence license type. They can also provide a workaround for when concurrent session licenses are to be removed.

• Additional FAQs. I’ve added a bunch more to help you self-serve.

The updated article remains in the wiki and you can also download or preview the PPT edition (version 1.2.1). Both this blog post and the original blog post point to the same article. Feel free to follow either for updates.

The current list of FAQs included in the article are:

• Q. For Business Intelligence Roles, why are no Teams listed under the ‘Concurrent Session License’ tab
• Q. What Business Intelligence license will new users be assigned when defining Default Roles for Analytics Hub Role AND a Business Intelligence Role (and assigning the ‘concurrent session’)
• Q. Is there any difference, from a license perspective, between the different roles of the same License Type
• Q. Is there something special about the ‘Admin’ Roles provided by the Service
• Q. What license type will be consumed by the ‘System Owner’
• Q. Why is the Business Intelligence User (Concurrent Session License) Count at 0
• Q. How can I see which users are members of which Teams and Roles
• Q. What happens when the concurrent session license limit is reached
• Q. How do you un-assign licenses
• Q. Is it possible to de-activate (suspend or disable) a user
• Q. How can I easily see which users are assigned which licence
• Q. How do you determine who uses SAP Analytics Cloud more frequently than others
• Q. Can you use SAML attribute mapping to define which user license should be used
• Q. Is it possible to create a user, without any roles and without being a member of any teams, and still set the ‘Business Intelligence’ license type to ‘concurrent’
• Q. Can I have 2 ‘default’ roles
• Q. Are Concurrent Session licenses available
• Q. Is it possible to set the users’ ‘Business Intelligence’ license type to ‘concurrent’ even when the SAP Analytics Cloud Service doesn’t have any ‘concurrent session’ licenses
• Q. Can a request role be set to switch the license type to concurrent
• Q. What happens when Concurrent User licenses are removed from the Service
• Q. Why can’t I change the licenses assigned

Your feedback is most welcome. Before posting a question, please do read the article carefully and take note of any replies I’ve made to others in the original blog post. In general, please post questions to the original blog post, rather than here. It will just help other customers by keeping things in one place.

Please hit the ‘like’ button on this article or comments to indicate its usefulness.

Many thanks

Matthew Shaw @MattShaw_on_BI