Visualizing third-party software license procurement with AWS Marketplace single pane of glass dashboard

AWS Marketplace has an updated AWS Marketplace Single Pane of Glass (SPG) dashboard. This gives buyers the ability to visualize software licenses associated with their AWS Marketplace subscriptions. SPG is a part of the Cloud Intelligence Dashboards allowing buyers to obtain insights about their AWS Marketplace procurement of third-party software, data products, and professional services. Buyers can be technical users or business stakeholders from procurement, finance, legal, and compliance teams.

AWS Marketplace has control and governance features that buyers can use to manage their AWS Marketplace subscriptions. Our previous post, Simplify AWS Marketplace activity visualization with a single pane of glass, introduces how to use the SPG dashboard. You can get a simplified view of your AWS Marketplace subscriptions to manage spend and track usage.

In this post, we go over the enhancement to the SPG dashboard. You can use the dashboard to visualize the deployment, grants, and terms of licenses associated with your AWS Marketplace software subscriptions. In some situations, IT or engineering teams may restrict business stakeholders, without required AWS training, from accessing the live production environments through AWS consoles. In these situations, you can view this business intelligence (BI) dashboard in read-only mode and obtain the desired visibility into your AWS Marketplace activity.

Prerequisites

You need to deploy the Amazon QuickSight based SPG dashboard to gain access to this visualization capability. The Cloud Intelligence Dashboards Framework (Figure 1) provides step-by-step instructions to establish the necessary data transformation pipeline for the SPG dashboard.

Figure 1: Cloud Intelligence Dashboard Framework

The dashboard sources data from the AWS Cost and Usage Reports (AWS CUR), including CUR 2.0, AWS Organizations, and AWS License Manager. For questions about cost, visit Amazon QuickSight pricing, you will need to do a one-time set up of AWS License Manager. Then, you will give AWS Marketplace the permissions to manage licenses on your behalf, using the AWSServiceRoleForMarketplaceLicenseManagement service-linked role. Figure 2 below provides an overview of how the Amazon S3 bucket deployed in the SPG dashboard data collection account sources data from AWS License Manager.

Figure 2: SPG dashboard data collection from AWS License Manager data

Solution overview

The SPG dashboard adds a new tab with various visualizations that provide better procurement insights into your AWS Marketplace subscriptions.

AWS Marketplace automatically creates licenses for Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), containers, machine learning (ML) models, software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings, and data products. You can use AWS License Manager to manage entitlements for product licenses procured in AWS Marketplace. Granted licenses are licenses for products that your organization purchased in AWS Marketplace or AWS Data Exchange.

The new tab includes a Granted and Entitled Licenses tab to visualize licenses for all AWS Marketplace subscriptions. Now you can correlate third-party product deployments with spend and usage, identify unused licenses, and reduce the risk of multiple subscriptions. You can visualize a comprehensive footprint of all third-party software and data products procured in AWS Marketplace and deployed across your AWS accounts.

Solution walkthrough: Visualizing third-party software license procurement with SPG

The SPG dashboard covers all AWS Marketplace procurement, whether from self-service public or private offers. SPG provides a unified view into your AWS Marketplace procurement, whether you have one or multiple management (payer) accounts. The previous version of the SPG dashboard offered a view into billable spending and usage associated with your AWS Marketplace subscriptions. You can now view the licenses associated with those subscriptions across your AWS accounts, whether sourced through subscriptions or license grants.

License administrators can use AWS License Manager to manage the use of these licenses and distribute rights of use, known as entitlements, to specific AWS accounts. You can share granted licenses for AMIs, containers, ML models, and data products, with other accounts in your AWS organization. This is possible when the Access level in the product is set to the Agreement level by the seller. After a license administrator distributes an entitlement to an AWS account and the recipient accepts the granted license, the subscription is available to the AWS account.

Figure 3: Using AWS License Manager to distribute rights of use

Upcoming Contract Expirations is a chronological table that shows the granted licenses that have defined expiration dates, with the soonest expiration listed first. You can use the filter to display the expiration period.

Figure 4: Upcoming contract expiration table shows expiring licenses

Product mapping to License Grants is a Sankey visual that shows how the products with active AWS Marketplace licenses map to AWS accounts where the license grants originated.

Figure 5: Product Mapping to License Grants

License Summary by Product is a table you can use to trace the number of licenses granted by product and by the AWS Marketplace seller of record. You can correlate the licenses with any related usage and billing information for those products in the Spend Summary or Spend Deep Dive tabs.

Figure 6: License Summary by Product

Org View of Licenses is table that shows a comprehensive view of all active AWS Marketplace product licenses that have been deployed across all your AWS accounts, including license grant dates, start date, and expiration dates, if applicable.

Figure 7: Organization view of licenses

License Grant and Sharing Details is a table that lists the details of license grants by product and seller, including the Subscribing AWS ID and the Recipient AWS ID for each grant.

Figure 8: License grant and sharing details table

The license data in the dashboard refreshes once a day. If you want to customize the schedule, review Tailoring Data Collector schedules. You can export raw data and visualization results as a comma-separated value (CSV) file, use with Microsoft Excel or other in-house tools. Private marketplace controls in AWS Marketplace deployed by your organization do not impact the visualizations in your SPG dashboard.

Wrap-up: Enhanced visibility by pairing SPG dashboard with the procurement insights dashboard

AWS Marketplace has released the Procurement Insights dashboard, which is available to buyers in the AWS Marketplace console. These dashboards together offer multiple options for buyers to visualize their AWS Marketplace procurement activity, but also have differentiated capabilities. SPG is a stand-alone tool outside the AWS console, which you can access using a mobile or web browser, for an unified view across multiple AWS payer IDs. You can share read-only SPG views with users using your organization’s single sign-on, without requiring AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions necessary for AWS console access. As a business intelligence dashboard, you can also extend SPG with additional data or customize your visualizations.

Conclusion

In this post, we demonstrated how to visualize your AWS Marketplace spend, usage, and license tracking. The SPG dashboard offers these insights for improved governance and control of your third-party software. For more information about using the SPG dashboard, visit the demo dashboard or contact your AWS account team for a meeting with your AWS Marketplace customer advisor.

About the Authors

Kaushik Raha is a Principal Business Development Manager and AWS Marketplace Customer Advisor. He supports a portfolio of customers, including digital native businesses, startups, and enterprise companies. He enjoys helping customers strategize and adopt AWS Marketplace to digitally transform their procurement functions. In his spare time, he enjoys programming and sailing and is a wine aficionado.

Soumya Vanga is a solutions architect with expertise in designing and implementing scalable solutions for complex business problems. Outside of work, she enjoys audiobooks, building Legos, and road trips with her family.

Ramya Vijayaraghavan is an AWS Marketplace specialist Solution Architect based in Dallas. Ramya has over 12 years of industry experience in the field of databases and data analytics. Ramya helps customers with building secure cloud solutions using third-party products from AWS Marketplace.