SAP Analytics Cloud – License Usage Limits

Delayed

The release of license usage limits feature has been delayed until at least October. We anticipate this will be turned on in a phased manner in October / November time frame. 

Overview

We will be introducing important changes to license usage limits in SAP Analytics Cloud. This will be taking place in the Q2 release 2023 Q3 release sometime in calendar Q3 for SAC (CF and NEO). In this blog I’ll outline all the changes and what this means for you.

Licensing Usage Limits Today

With SAP Analytics Cloud, you can choose the number of Business Intelligence, Planning Standard, Planning Pro and Analytics Hub licenses. When you create a user, the user is assigned one of these licenses based on the role they have. If you create a user even though there are no licenses left, there would be a warning message at the bottom of the screen, but the user creation process would still succeed.

New License Usage Limits Behavior

The new behavior will mean that user creation/update workflows will fail if there are no licenses left. To unblock these administration workflows you will have 3 options: purchase more licenses, removing users or deactivating users (mentioned in this blog).

The license usage limits will impact all operations that involve user licenses. This table will describe the areas that will see changes:

	Users Page – creating/updating/activating users Teams Page – adding/deleting users to teams Roles Page – adding/deleting users/teams to roles Requests Page – approving requests that grant roles to users
	Importing Users from File – Importing via CSV
API	SCIM API
SAML	Dynamically Created Users Roles/Teams SAML Attribute Mapping

Surplus Licenses

There will be the ability to exceed a lower license type if a higher license type is available. This is done automatically. The user will still show the same license type in the Users page, but you can see in the Monitoring page that they are using a surplus.

As an example, if there are 0/10 Planning Professional Licenses used, but 10/10 BI licenses used. If you try to create a new user with a BI Role, this will still work because there are Planning Professional licenses used.

Example Demo

To give you an idea of how this will work, let me demonstrate the following:

• how to find your current usage
• successful creation of a user with licenses remaining
• failed creation of a user with no licenses remaining
• deactivating users to free up a license

Current usage

You can view the current license limits and your consumption through the Monitoring Page

Go to System > Monitoring

In the above image, you will notice that Planning Professional has reached 10/10, Planning Standard is 3/10, Business Intelligence is 9/10

Successful User Creation

Based on the monitoring page, I have room to create 1 user that will use a Business Intelligence license. I will use the BI Admin role for this.

This user creation is successful!

Checking the monitoring page, the Business Intelligence licenses has increased by 1 and I am now at my license limit for Planning Professional and Business Intelligence.

Failed User Creation

I will now try to create a new user with a Planning Professional license (Admin role). Remember that I am at 10/10 for Planning Professional licenses. In addition, Surplus logic does not apply in this case because Planning Professional is the highest license type.

This operation will not succeed, and I will get the error:

**Note, if you try to create another BI user, even though there is 10/10, this is allowed with the surplus logic because there are free Planning Standard licenses **

Deactivating a user to free up a license

The Planning Professional license is fully used up. To free up a license, I can use the activate/deactivate feature, which will allow me to deactivate a user and give back a license.

Going into the Users Page, I select T1 and click Deactivate Users. This would free up a Planning Professional license.

I can now repeat the user creation from the previous step and it will succeed.

Additional Information

Default License

If a user is created with no role, the Business Intelligence license will be provided automatically to this user. This is applicable if there is no other default role specified.

Concurrent Licenses

Concurrent licenses are not impacted by the license usage limits. This only applies to named users licenses

How to Prepare for the changes?

With the license usage limit update, you may be wondering what you have to do to prepare for these changes. The first thing is to understand what tasks will be impacted. Essentially any user workflows would be impacted. Here is a short list of the typical workflows:

• creating users
• updating user’s roles (adding and removing)
• activating a user. The previous role consumes a license that has reached the limits.
• updating roles
• adding users and teams to roles
• updating teams
• deleting teams and roles (users will get the default BI license)
• approving roles for users
• user creation / updates through scim (which include role and team assignments)
• users that are dynamically created on login and the default role has reached capacity
• users that assigned roles through saml attribute mapping

For any tenants that are currently exceeding licenses, your users will still work. This means that users will still be able to log into the system and everything will remain functional. However, any updates to these users that will impact licenses will not be possible. It is strongly recommended that you become compliant by deactivating users, deleting users or increasing your licensing.

To increase your licenses, please reach out to sapdigitaldeals@sap.com or your SAP Account Executive .

I hope this blog was helpful and provides you with enough information on the new feature.