Agent-based Licensing

Create a License Rule

  1. Click SettingsSettings > License > Rules.
  2. Click CreateCreate.
  3. In theGeneral tab, enter the name of your rule and the number of units for each agent module type that this rule allocates.
  4. In the Application Scope tab, select Specified Applications to restrict which applications agents can report to.

    Note: Only agents that report to the applications you specify can consume the units allocated by this rule. You can select one or more applications from the Available Applications list and click the left arrow button to move the applications to the Included Applications box. You can also specify matching criteria for applications that you have not yet created. The applications you specify using matching criteria will not appear in the Selected Applications box. You can select up to 100 applications to assign to a rule.
  5. In the Server Scope tab, select Specified Servers to restrict which servers agents can be deployed to.

    Note:
    • Only agents deployed on the servers you specify can consume the units allocated by this rule. You can select one or more servers from the Available Servers list, and click the left arrow to move the applications to the Selected Applications box. You can specify matching criteria for allowed servers using the Add button. You can also specify matching criteria for servers not yet monitored by Splunk AppDynamics. The applications you specify using matching criteria will not appear in the Selected Applications box.
    • Using the criteria specifications, you can select applications and servers by matching multiple machines using the match criteria. This is more efficient than scrolling through thousands of applications and machines to make your selections manually.
    • You can also add uninstrumented applications to the rule in the Application Scope and unmonitored machines in the Server Scope so that when you install the agents to instrument these unmonitored applications and servers, they will be allowed to consume licenses defined in this rule.

    This diagram is an example of a scope configuration.

  6. Return to the default rule and decrement your unit allocation by the number of units that you allocated in your custom rule. Otherwise, the allocations will show as over-provisioned.

    Note: You must allocate the same number of Machine Agents as your APM Agents. For example, if you allocate 10 Java Agents, 10 .NET Agents, and 10 Node.js Agents, you must allocate 30 Machine Agent units. For each rule you create, a new access key is generated, and the agents under that rule are authenticated with that generated key. Update your agent to use this new access key and restart the agent.

Best Practices

ActionRecommendation

Create License Rules

When you create license rules, follow consistent criteria for selecting which applications belong to a rule.

We recommend:

  • If you want a rule to contain multiple applications, then group applications by business unit.
  • If you want to view individual application usage, then select only one application per rule.

Delete a Default License Rule

Splunk AppDynamics does not recommend deleting default license rules. Instead, we recommend changing all of the license entitlements to 0.

Warning:

If you do delete a default rule:

  • If there is only one license rule (for example, the default), deleting it will take the License Management UI back to a state when license rules never existed.
  • Deleting a license rule will not impact existing agents because they will start reporting using the account-level access key.
  • If you have multiple license rules (one default and multiple custom) and you delete the default rule, you will not be able to recreate it until you delete all other rules.
  • Click Create Rules to create a new default rule. The access key will be different and you will also need to re-configure your agents.

Delete a custom license rule

Deleting and recreating a custom license rule will not retrieve the old access key, even if you use the same name, since access keys are generated dynamically at runtime.