Find out about APM license allocation and how you can specify how many APM licenses to allocate to applications and machines.
License rules help you specify the distribution of licenses across all of your applications and machines. You can oversee your license pool and, based on your usage, use license rules to reallocate licenses and scale out certain applications. There are two types of rules: default and custom. We’ll break down these two types of rules below, though you can also read about them in our official documentation.
License rules are not mandatory and can be based on your Controller or account preferences. For example, you can manage multiple accounts as a Controller admin and decide which account should have license rules and which should not.
To enable the license rules feature, navigate to the gear icon → License → Rules tab → Create Rule.
The following image illustrates the flexibility of license assignments:
Here are three examples of how license rules function based on the License Rules Overview diagram above.
Default rules automatically distribute licenses across all applications per need basis if you don’t have a custom rule set up. To see if you have created any rules, navigate to Gear icon → License → Rules tab. If there are none, click Create Rule. This will set up a "default" rule, which will also be the name of the rule. When it’s created, it will have all license entitlements and its AccessKey will be the same as the Account Level AccessKey.
You can rename the default rule (e.g., “Default” → “John Doe”), but it’s not recommended since it can create confusion. Once you rename it, the only way to know that it is the default one is to match its AccessKey to that of the Account Level AccessKey.
You can also set up custom rules, which let you to specify the number of licenses allocated to certain license modules. When creating a custom rule, you can stipulate how many units to allocate to a rule or which applications/servers can consume agents. Once the new license rule is set up, licenses will be allocated according to your new preferences. Please note that the custom rule AccessKey will be different than the Account Level AccessKey.
For detailed instructions on how to create a custom rule and steps to take after setting one up, see: Creating Custom Rules.
The screenshot below shows which agents are supported through License Management (License Rules) as of 4.4.2+. Please note that some are not available in 4.3.x versions. License Rules only support APM, Machine Agents, Server Visibility, and Network Visibility. If you are using .NET Agents, you will need an equal number of Machine Agents and .NET Agents in a rule or the agents will stop reporting.
To learn more about this scenario, see: What happens if I delete a license rule?
Last Updated: 3/20/19