On Sat, Sep 27, 2014 at 8:07 AM, Nilesh Shah <nshah250@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

We want to evaluate CandlePin for following requirements

1) Managing in-house software licenses and subscriptions, its purchases, entitlements, usage and any deviation.

Assuming you would use a client tool like subscription-manager to register your end systems, and assign subscriptions to each of those systems, this might make sense.

2) We currently manage this data in excel files. Need a way by which we can bulk upload this data to CandlePin

We expose a REST API, You would need to write your own tools/scripts to create appropriate Subscription/Pool objects in Candlepin.

3) We need reporting capabilities to understand software license usage, expiring licenses and subscriptions

In theory Candlepin should be pretty good for this. We have a reporting project underway known as "gutterball". This too will not have a UI, but rather provides a REST API (again) which we will expose as part of Katello/Satellite 6.

4) Some Misc features like, email notification if over usage, email notifications for expiring software licenses etc...

We do not offer any email notifications but we do have an event system which you could probably leverage to write a custom event handler that would send emails.

Candlepin does not really currently support the concept of over-consumption, we enforce a hard limit only today.

Along with CandlePin, we are also evaluating Kwok (http://www.kwoksys.com/)
However CandlePin looks more mature.

What we want to understand is,

1) While CandlePin does not have any UI, does Subscription manager is the only UI/CLI for CandlePin? Are there any other UI applications for CandlePin?

Subscription Manager is the only client side UI we know of. Candlepin is a part of the Katello project which is a systems management webUI, and it's supported Red Hat version, Satellite 6.

2) Does subscription manager provide all UI Capabilities? It means that does it support above mentioned functionality what we are looking at? Please consider emailing and reporting also here as mentioned above?

Subscription-manager is a client UI, it is for registering a client system and then assigning subscriptions to it. It does not offer a UI for overview of subscription usage, emails, or reporting.

3) While using CandlePin and subscription manager, if we need any support in actual installation/deployment and use, do we get channelized support to address the issues we are facing?

Candlepin is not an officially supported project by Red Hat, other than within the context of the Satellite product. We can try to help via this mailing list, bugzilla or github issues but there is no official support.

Cheers,

Devan

Can you please help us addressing above queries so that we can progress our evaluation?

Thanks
Nilesh

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