Tooling that powers our engagements
Capturing the data that builds an accurate Microsoft license position — across every environment that matters.
How we approach the data side
Microsoft licensing is a moving target. The data needed to build an accurate license position spans your on-prem domain, your virtualized estate, and your cloud footprint — and the right toolkit varies by engagement.
We don't reinvent the wheel. Where your existing tools can produce clean, licensing-relevant data, we use them. Where there are gaps, we fill them with proprietary tooling we've built specifically for the licensing problem — not for general IT inventory.
Whatever the mix, the coverage is the same: every part of your Microsoft footprint, captured cleanly, ready to map against entitlement.
On-Prem Environments
Accurate licensing for on-prem environments requires capturing far more than a server inventory. Identity, OS, software installations, hardware, environment classification, and user access patterns all affect your license position — and missing any of them is where audit findings live.
- Active Directory users and groups
- Workstation and server OS — versions, editions, install patterns
- Microsoft software installations across all workstations and servers (every licensable footprint)
- Hardware — processor, core, and socket information
- Environment classification — production, non-production, passive DR, vendor-provided software
- Windows RDS user access
- User-based access to on-prem technologies where licensing-relevant
Whether we use your existing inventory tools, ours, or a combination — every data point above gets captured cleanly and normalized for license mapping.
Virtual Environments
Virtualization multiplies licensing complexity. A single Microsoft workload on a VM that vMotions across hosts in a cluster can trigger licensing well beyond what the VM alone suggests. Without accurate host-to-VM mapping and cluster-aware data, you're either over-licensing to be safe or carrying invisible exposure into your next audit.
- Virtual machine to physical host mapping
- Cluster topology, membership, and host pool definitions
- vMotion and DRS configurations — including movement patterns that affect licensing
- Physical core counts per host
- Virtual core allocations per VM
- VDI deployments and user-access patterns (with their distinct licensing rules)
Whether we use your existing virtualization management platform, ours, or a combination — the host, cluster, and core data needed to license your virtual estate correctly all gets captured.
Cloud Environments
Cloud licensing is where most environments have their biggest blind spots. M365 user assignments drift over time. Azure adds hybrid-benefit eligibility questions and workload-by-workload classification. And Microsoft licensing follows your workloads to AWS and GCP wherever Windows Server, SQL Server, or other Microsoft software runs.
- Microsoft 365 — user-level license assignments, stale users, duplicate licensing, SKU misalignment, and optimization opportunities
- Azure — Windows Server and SQL Server inventory across subscriptions, with hybrid benefit verification
- AWS — Microsoft workload inventory across EC2 instances, with licensing-mode classification
- Google Cloud Platform — Microsoft workload inventory across Compute Engine
- Cross-cloud reconciliation against your entitlement portfolio
Whether the cloud data comes from your existing tooling, ours, or a combination — every Microsoft license obligation across your cloud footprint gets captured and reconciled.
What an engagement looks like
The same toolkit-tailored approach, applied consistently across every engagement.
Discovery
We start by understanding your environment, your concerns (audit, renewal, optimization, or just clarity), and what tools you already have producing data.
Toolkit
Together we identify which of your existing tools can carry weight, where there are data gaps, and which of our proprietary tools fill those gaps. The toolkit is bespoke, never templated.
Capture
Data is collected, normalized, and reconciled against your entitlement. We surface the gaps, the overspend, and the audit exposure — with evidence behind every line.
Position
You walk away with a defensible Microsoft license position — clean enough to defend in an audit, accurate enough to negotiate a renewal, and precise enough to optimize.
Where to start.
Schedule a 30-minute call. Tell us where you're starting — heading into an audit, planning a renewal, or just trying to understand your license position. We'll tell you what we'd do, and whether we're the right fit for the work.