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Manage a team — seats and usage

A team license serves a fixed number of floating (concurrent) seats. Any team member can use a seat; the number in use at once is capped by how many you own. This page covers how seats behave and where an administrator manages them.

For the difference between license types and how they're served (cloud vs. on-premises), see Which license do I have, and how is it served?.

How a seat is checked out and released

  • A seat is checked out when someone launches Understand (or starts a headless und / API session) against the shared license.
  • It's released when they close Understand or return the seat. If a process exits without a clean release, the server reclaims the seat automatically when its heartbeat times out, so seats don't stay stuck for long.
  • When all seats are already in use, the next user sees a "License In Use!" dialog ("Your Understand license is in use.") with Retry, New License, Claim License, and Cancel options. They can wait and retry, or a seat frees up as teammates close the app.

Free a stuck seat / manage installations

If a machine is holding a seat it shouldn't (for example, a crashed session or a retired laptop):

  • From the license-error dialog — Claim License (on the License In Use dialog) or Manage Installs (on the Too Many Installs dialog) — a button opens a browser page on the licensing portal where you can release one of your other installations.
  • From the command line, und -deregisterlicensecode releases the current machine's seat. See Licensing from the command line and the und licensing reference.

If the whole license is over its installation limit, the dialog reads "Your Understand license is installed on too many machines." — use Manage Installs to free one.

Where seats and usage live

Seats, installations, and organization membership are managed in the licensing portal at licensing.scitools.com, signed in as the account that owns the license. That is where an administrator adds seats, releases installations, and reviews the organization's license status.

For a self-hosted deployment, the on-premises Icarus license server serves seats to machines on your network and has its own web GUI for seat, user, and usage management — see Set up an on-premises license server (Icarus). Point clients at it with und -setlicenseserver <host> or the UNDERSTAND_LICENSE_SERVER environment variable (see command-line licensing).

Traveling / offline seats

Floating seats can be checked out for offline use and returned later — see Check out an offline license.

Legacy License Manager

Older FlexLM-style tooling (a local License Manager with license.dat and the almstatus command for usage reports) belongs to the legacy licensing model and is not part of the current cloud/Icarus licensing. On the current model, seat and usage information comes from the licensing portal rather than a local report command.