Does setting Manage node(s) with NCM to 'no' free up a licence?

Question

I know that setting a device to unmanaged doesn't free up a licence, but this also appears to be different to selecting a node, choosing 'edit properties' then changing the Manage node(s) with NCM option to 'No' or 'Never'

When doing the latter the device disappears from all status and monitoring sections entirely, and when going to 'manage nodes' if I add the filter of 'NCM - Licensed' It shows up under 'no' instead of 'yes'. Does this mean the device no longer occupies a licence?

If so this would help us drastically as we have a lot of devices that don't need realtime monitoring, backup etc but we do very occasionally need to mass push config to them, or do a once off download of the config to see if they are still compliant to our templates

This would allow us to temporarily unlicence some low priority devices that don't need monitoring, add a batch of devices we need to work with, do our work then remove them and re-enable licencing of the other devices

The 1 downside I can see with this is it does delete the saved configurations for the device when setting to to 'no'. But this is acceptable as we have a lot of Radio's that very rarely change and we don't need to store their historical config

steffen.gutzeit · Answer

I believe you can have 400 devices but you would only see info for the 250 that you actually enabled for (are managing with) NCM.

Ask your Sales Rep to give you a 250 count license so you can test it. Tell me how it went please.

Cheerio,

Steffen

millenium7 · Answer

We're currently on an evaluation licence. I want to see if I can add more nodes than I have licences but not have them doing anything (just ready to be activated) but I can't test this because the evaluation licence is for an unlimited number of devices

So it does free up a licence, that's great. But I'm still not sure if the 'managed: no' feature is built around the idea of coupling NCM with other software (such as NPM) and you have lots of licences in that and only a few in NCM but you are still limited to the total number of devices (NCM + NPM licences = total nodes)

If we bought NCM with say 250 device licence (we don't have anything else, would just be NCM as that's all we need) can I have 400 nodes in the software. 250 with the licence, 150 without. Or will it still limit me to a total number of 250 devices regardless of whether licenced is set to yes or no

steffen.gutzeit · Answer

Hello.

You are correct. You can check how much of your license are being used by checking NCM Settings -> Node Licensing and there at NCM, current number of nodes

Best regards,

Steffen Gutzeit