Manage On-Prem Licenses

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Check Licenses

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To check your license type, restrictions, and/or expiration date:

1. In the sidebar, select Settings.
2. On the Global tab, select Licensing to see these details.

Add or Renew Licenses

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On the Leader (or in a Single-instance deployment), after submitting your newly untarred Cribl Stream software’s registration page, you can add and manage licenses at Settings > Global > Licensing. Select Add License to paste in a license key provided to you by Cribl.

This applies to Cribl Stream Standard and Enterprise licenses, which must be renewed annually. Free licenses are already onboard the download package, need not be added or managed here, and do not expire.

Licenses in Airgapped Deployments

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If your environment does not allow internet connectivity, you’ll need to bypass the registration Web form when you deploy or upgrade Cribl Stream. To do so:

1. On the Leader’s (or single instance’s) host, navigate to $CRIBL_HOME/local/cribl.

2. Create a file named licenses.yml.

3. Paste in your license key in this format, then save the result:

   licenses:
   - <your-license-key-here>

   Copy

Expiration/Renewal Notifications

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In Cribl Stream 4.3 and later, the UI will prompt you to renew your paid license by displaying banner and drawer notifications, starting 30 days before license expiration. When you see these prompts, verify your license’s expiration date and contact Cribl Sales at sales@cribl.io to renew.

Beyond these default notifications, you can configure custom License‑Expiration Notifications. You can send these to PagerDuty, or to other external services via webhook.

License Quotas

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Track Data Ingestion

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To track your data ingestion volume over the last 30 days:

1. In the sidebar, select Monitoring.
2. Select System and then Licensing. This shows you the dashboard with your license consumption.

For higher-fidelity metrics, you can enable the Cribl Internal Source’s CriblMetrics option to forward metrics to your metrics Destination of choice, and run a report on cribl.total.in_bytes.

Exemptions from License Quotas

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The following data is exempt from license quotas:

• Data generated by Cribl Internal Sources normally does not count against your ingestion quota.
• Edge Node events that you drop in any Pipeline do not count against your ingestion quota.

If you are connecting Workers/Edge Nodes in a Cribl Stream Cloud hybrid deployment, you are granted additional exemptions to prevent double billing (in Cribl Edge, these exemptions also apply to customer-managed deployments):

• Data transferred between Cribl Stream Workers via the Cribl HTTP and Cribl TCP Sources does not count against your ingestion quota.
• Data that Cribl Edge sends to Cribl Stream from the Cribl HTTP and Cribl TCP Destinations counts against quota only in Cribl Edge.
• Data generated by Datagens does not count against your ingestion quota.

License Quotas with Compressed S3 Buckets

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If you pull data from compressed S3 buckets, the license quota is applied to the uncompressed size of the file objects.

Enforce License Quotas

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If your data throughput exceeds your license quota:

• Free and Standard licenses enforce data ingestion quotas through limits on the number of Worker Groups/Fleets and Worker/Edge Node Processes.
• Enterprise license keys turn off all enforcement.
• When an Enterprise or Standard license expires, Cribl Stream will attempt to fall back to a trial or free license, or – only if that fails – will block incoming data. For details, see Combining Licenses.

License Types

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Cribl offers several Cribl Stream license types including Enterprise, Standard, and Free. For a current list of available license types and a detailed comparison of what’s included in each, see Cribl Pricing.

Combine Licenses

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Multiple licenses can coexist on one instance. When two or more Standard or Enterprise licenses are present, the effective ingestion quota for the deployment will be equal to the sum of their individual ingestion quotas.

When multiple license types coexist, the effective license is determined by the following priority order:

1. Enterprise or Standard licenses that have not expired.
2. Sales Trial licenses.
3. Free licenses.

License Expiration

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When an Enterprise or Standard license expires, you can remove the old license to fall back to the Sales Trial or Free type. An expired Sales Trial license will fall back to a Free license, but you must remove the Sales Trial license and restart the Leader.

To delete your expired license:

1. In the sidebar, select Settings.
2. On the Global tab, select Licensing.
3. Locate your expired license, and select Delete license.
4. Restart the Leader.

Upon expiration of a paid license, if there is no fallback license, Cribl Stream will backpressure and block all incoming data.

Licensing in Distributed Deployments

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With licenses that limit the number of Worker Processes/​Edge Nodes, Cribl Stream will attempt to balance or rebalance Worker Processes (threads) as evenly as possible across all licensed Worker Nodes.

You configure licensing only on the Leader Node. (See Managing Licenses – Adding and Renewing.) The Leader will push license information down to Worker Groups as part of the heartbeat (Stream, Edge). There is no need to configure or store licenses directly on Worker Nodes.

Temporary License Restriction on Worker Node Startup

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When you first start a Worker Node, it will use the default license. As a result, you might see a log entry warning about a limit on Worker Processes:

{
  "time": "2023-02-10T15:11:48.609Z",
  "cid": "api",
  "channel": "cribl",
  "level": "warn",
  "message": "number of worker processes has been limited by the license",
  "requested": 14,
  "licenseLimit": 10,
  "source": "cribl.log"
}

You can ignore this warning message. The license won’t limit Worker Processes once the Leader passes the production license to the Worker.

Convert an On-Prem License to a Cribl.Cloud Billing Plan

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You can convert on-prem Cribl Stream licenses to a Cribl.Cloud billing plan. This lets you keep your on-prem deployments of Cribl Stream, but manage all of the environment licenses in one interface.

For more details and setup steps, visit Connecting On-Prem Leaders to Cribl.Cloud Billing.

Telemetry Data

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A Free license requires sharing of telemetry metadata with Cribl. Cribl uses this metadata to help us understand how to improve the product and prioritize new features.

Telemetry payloads are sent from all Cribl Stream nodes (Leader and Workers), to an endpoint located at https://cdn.cribl.io/telemetry/.

Test the Telemetry Endpoint’s Connectivity

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To manually test connectivity to the telemetry endpoint, especially if you are needing to configure a proxy, you can use the following command:

curl https://cdn.cribl.io/telemetry/

Expected response:

cribl /// living the stream!

If you get a 302 response code, check whether you’ve omitted the URL’s trailing /.

Disable Telemetry

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With an Enterprise or Standard license, you have the option to disable telemetry sharing from on-prem Cribl Stream. With a Free license, disabling telemetry will cause Cribl Stream to block inbound traffic within 24 hours.

If you would like an exception to disable telemetry in order to deploy in your environment, please contact Cribl Sales at sales@cribl.io, and we will work with you to issue licenses on a case-by-case basis.

Once you have received a license that removes the telemetry requirement, you can disable telemetry in Cribl Stream’ at Settings > Global > System > General Settings > Upgrade & Share Settings and toggling Share telemetry with Cribl off.

Metadata Shared Through Telemetry

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Your Cribl Stream instance shares metadata with Cribl per interval (roughly, every minute).

Details sent for nodes in any mode:

• Version
• OS Distribution/Version
• Kernel Version
• Instance’s GUID
• License ID
• Earliest, Latest Time
• Number of Events In and Out, overall and by Source type and Destination type
• Number of Bytes In and Out, overall and by Source type and Destination type
• Number of Open, Closed, Active Connections
• Number of Routes
• Number of Pipelines
• Runtime Environment Indicators (AWS and Kubernetes)

Additional details sent for Leader nodes (when Cribl isn’t sending managed node data):

• Runtime Environment
• OS Distribution / Version
• Version
• Kernel Version

How We Use Telemetry Data

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With telemetry enabled, Cribl software sends usage data directly to Cribl. We securely store and encrypt this data on Cribl-managed servers, with restricted access.

Cribl fully anonymizes and aggregates this usage data in our systems of analysis. There, we use the aggregated metrics to improve Cribl products and services by analyzing circumstances around disruptions, opportunities for ingest efficiencies, and ways to optimize performance. Access is restricted to only those Cribl employees and contractors who require anonymized data to perform their jobs.

Cribl collects License IDs only to ensure that all data is being sent by a Cribl product. These IDs cannot be used to personally identify any user of Cribl software or Cribl.Cloud services.

For further details, see the Cribl Privacy Policy.

Troubleshooting Resources

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Cribl University offers a Troubleshooting Criblet on Switching from Free to Enterprise. To follow the direct course link, first log into your Cribl University account. (To create an account, select the Sign up link. You’ll need to click through a short Terms & Conditions presentation, with chill music, before proceeding to courses – but Cribl’s training is always free of charge.) Once logged in, check out other useful Troubleshooting Criblets and Advanced Troubleshooting short courses.