Validating ILMT output against your entitlements.
ILMT tells you what is deployed. It does not know what you own. A clean ILMT report is only half a compliance position, and the half IBM already has. The defensible half is the reconciliation between consumption and entitlement, and it is the step most estates skip until the audit forces it.
What ILMT measures, and what it does not
ILMT is a measurement tool. It discovers IBM software, attributes processor capacity to each product, and reports consumption in PVU or, since Passport Advantage v11, in VPC for metered products. What it never holds is the other side of the ledger: your Passport Advantage entitlements, the quantities you bought, the editions you are licensed for, and the bundling rights attached to them. ILMT can tell you that you are consuming 12,000 PVU of Db2. It cannot tell you whether you own 12,000, 8,000 or 20,000. Only the reconciliation answers that.
Where ILMT over reports
Left uncorrected, ILMT inflates consumption in predictable ways, and each inflation becomes a finding if IBM reads the report before you do:
- Miscategorized installs, where a component is mapped to a full product it does not belong to.
- Bundled entitlements counted as standalone, for example a Db2 instance bundled with another product being charged as a separate Db2 deployment.
- Trial, non production or decommissioned instances still appearing in the bundle and adding capacity.
- Capacity attributed to the wrong product on shared hosts, so one product carries another product's cores.
None of these are bugs you report to IBM. They are defaults you correct, with evidence, before the number is treated as truth.
The reconciliation that builds the position
A defensible reconciliation lines up three columns for every product: what ILMT reports, what your entitlements grant, and the corrected consumption after miscategorizations and bundling rights are applied. The gap between corrected consumption and entitlement is your real position. Often it is far smaller than the raw ILMT output, and sometimes it shows you are under deployed and over licensed, which is leverage in its own right at renewal. Either way, the number you defend should be the corrected one, not the raw export an auditor would otherwise anchor on.
ILMT output is an input, not a verdict. IBM will treat the raw report as your consumption unless you have already corrected the miscategorizations and mapped consumption against entitlement. Do the reconciliation first, keep the evidence for every correction, and you walk into the audit with a position. Skip it and you inherit ILMT's defaults as findings.
Have you reconciled ILMT against what you actually own?
Our ILMT Remediation engagement corrects the miscategorizations, applies your bundling rights, and reconciles consumption against entitlement so the number you defend is the right one. We mobilize within 48 hours of your audit notice.
See ILMT Remediation →The IBM Audit Brief
Audit triggers, ILMT pitfalls, and settlement tactics for IBM software buyers.
Independent, buyer side IBM software audit defense and negotiation. Not affiliated with IBM Corporation.