For agent-based license units—including APM, database monitoring, and server monitoring—licenses are allocated to the first agents that register with the Controller up to the licensed limit. For example, with five agent licenses, the first five agents that connect to the Controller are licensed.

Agent licenses are not bound to a particular machine or application. Therefore, a transfer of an agent-based license can be accomplished simply by shutting down the application that runs the licensed agent—uninstalling the agent if the application will need to be restarted—and starting up the new application with the newly installed agent. Once the agent disconnects, a license unit is freed for the second agent.

For application monitoring agents (Java, .NET, Node.JS, and so on), a license validation cycle runs every five minutes. It causes the agents to connect and validate that available license units are not exceeded. Historical usage data is captured during this cycle and stored as five-minute usage data. Every hour, the five-minute usage data is rolled up in hour usage data, which includes data on license unit usage. The five-minute data is purged after a few hours.