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Licensing

I haven't thought this through, but an incident at one of our sites over the weekend brought this up.

Basically we had a power outage of several hours that also brought down one of our three pollers and the hot-standby server.

I would have loved to just move the hot-standby licence to another data center for a couple of hours while the issue was resolved...

It occurred to me that it would have been great if the licence was held on the database server rather than each poller/module. From my 'user' view, I have paid for x number of licences, and in today's virtual server farms we have the ability to move applications/services very quickly between physical servers.

The limitation I had was how fast I could contact support and have the license moved - rather than a technical limitation.

Would it be practical to have an app on the database server to control the licensing, so that we were free to move pollers around?

Dave.

  • FormerMember
    0 FormerMember

    We have been batted around the idea of creating a license server that would hold a number of elements (e.g., 10,000).  Customer would no longer pay by poller.  You could poll your licensed number using as many pollers as you want.  If you want more, you buy a pack of additional elements.

    To reiterate, it's an idea that's been floated.  Not something we've considered seriously.  But, in that vein, what do you think?  Would that be a more useful way to license.

  • Yes, I think that this would be a useful way forward.

    On the upside, it would give great flexibility as to how the pollers could be deployed without concern for placement, optimum poller hardware, location etc.

    It may also allow SolarWinds to be more flexible concerning the number of APM component licences for example, and the number of NPM licenses. I see a number of users on the forum who don't like (or have the need) to buying matching SLX licences for example.

    It would also allow us to continue using older legacy hardware for polling engines - rather than trying to run as many elements as possible from a single server (in order to maximize our SLX licenses). Sometimes this approach is actually counter productive - as a server under stress is more likely to be unstable.

    On the downside, it would be a difficult transition for some people. We are tyring to push towards 8,000 elements per SLX poller, but I know some others are already running at 10,000. Just how you move from an 'unlimited' concept to capped would be an interesting challenge.

    Dave.

  • FormerMember
    0 FormerMember in reply to savell

    Thanks for the feedback.   That's reflective of our thinking so far.

    It may also allow SolarWinds to be more flexible concerning the number of APM component licences for example, and the number of NPM licenses. I see a number of users on the forum who don't like (or have the need) to buying matching SLX licences for example.

    To clear up some confusion here, APM does NOT require any match to the NPM licensing. You can run an NPM SLX and an APM AL-50.    Applications are not direct extensions of network monitoring, so the licensing is not tied.

  • Sorry Denny, APM was a bad example (I actually didn't realise NPM and APM weren't linked in terms of licensing until just a few days ago - funny what you miss sometimes).

    Dave.