The Transactional Log Parser is a tool created to process the Altair license transactional logs, recorded by the Altair License Manager, resulting in an organized CSV version of the data, making this output easily compatible with other tools to extract detailed usage information to help you understand how you take advantage of your license. The output is represented by complete transactions having a beginning and ending time stamp. These time stamps represent the feature checkout and checkin actions respectively.
In order to run the Transactional Log Parser you will need first to retrieve the usage logs generated by your License Manager. If you need information on how to retrieve these logs, please read the Retrieve usage logs from a Managed license article for licenses Managed on Altair One, or Retrieve license usage logs from an on-prem server license for on-premises servers.
Running the Parser
The Parser should be run from a command line session. The script is located in the installation directory of the Altair License Manager, which by default is:
Windows: C:\Program Files\Altair\licensingXX.x\bin\parser.bat
Linux: /usr/local/altair/licensingXX.x/bin/parser.sh
Where XX.x represents the ALM release version.
It accepts the following options:
-H Report Time based values in Hours.
-M Report Time based values in Minutes (Default).
-S Report Time based values in seconds.
-eow "End of World" option (see below).
-split Split multi-day records. Transactions that span midnight will be split into multiple transactions with a record for each day.
End of world option implication:
1. If a checkin is missing, and –eow is NOT specified, and the checkout is listed in the newest log file, then no record should be written. (this is an open record that should be picked up in later logs)
2. If a checkin is missing, and –eow is NOT specified, and the checkout is NOT listed in the next log file, the transaction is closed with the open time of the first log file where the checkout no longer appears in the beginning section. If the transaction isn’t checked in by the end of the last log file, no transaction is written to the output file.
3. If a checkin is missing and –eow IS specified, then the record should be closed at the closing time of the most recent log file that still has the checkout. The transaction will be written to the output file using the last timestamp of the last log file processed.
Transactional Log Parser Example
This example will include logs for 30 days but any number of days can be used. Once you have gathered and uzipped the usage data you want to parse from the License Manager or Altair One, you will need to run the parser script on a command line session. The command will require the following structure:
...\parser.bat <input_log_files_directory> <output_csv_file> <options>
For this example, the uzipped data files will be stored in in this case at C:\TEMP\license-12345 and we will save the output file "usage.csv"at the C:\TEMP directory. For this we will run the parser without options with the following command:
This is the output information:
All the log files found at such directory will be processed...
Once done, the parser should have processed all the log files located in the "license-12345" directory and generated the usage.csv output file in the C:\TEMP directory.
You now can load this file into Microsoft Excel or similar application in order to analyze the data. For this example, we will generate the Max and Average Altair Units per day chart from the 30 day data that has been parsed. For this purpose we will be focusing on the transactions for the HyperWorks feature as this represents Altair Units.
In order to generate the Max and Average Altair Units per day chart we will be looking at the HyperWorks feature and the "Total Units Used for Feature before Checkin" column, graphing the max and avg units per day: