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Licensing

EEI products, including every EEI Seeq connector, are licensed with a small signed file that says what the product may do and on which server. The product checks that file itself, on your server, without contacting EEI. This page explains what the file contains, how it behaves, and how renewal works. To install one, see Installing a License.

A separate license from your platform's

An EEI license is separate from your Seeq license, or from the license for whichever platform the product runs on. Your platform license covers the platform. The EEI license covers the EEI product installed on it. You need both, even where you buy both from the same partner.

Our preference is to align the EEI license term with your platform license, so both renew together.

What a license contains

What it means
Product The EEI product it is for. A license for one product does nothing for another
Capacity How much the product may run at once. For a data connector, the number of active datasources: each enabled connection counts as one, and maps to one datasource in Seeq. Some connectors count a different unit, such as metadata sources, and say so
Expiry The date the license stops being valid. Evaluation licenses simply have a near date
Features Optional capabilities the product enables only if the license names them
Server binding The server, or servers, it is valid on. See below
Signature EEI's digital signature over all of the above. Editing any part of the file makes it invalid

Bound to your server

A license works only on the server it was issued for, so it cannot be copied to another machine. We issue it from a fingerprint your server produces.

What the fingerprint reads. Five identifiers the operating system already exposes: the OS installation ID, the motherboard's system UUID, the primary physical network adapter's address, the CPU model, and the host name.

What leaves your server. Only one-way, salted hashes of those five values, plus the plain host name, included so you and EEI can confirm which server a file came from. The raw hardware identifiers never leave the server, cannot be recovered from the hashes, and are never written into the license. There are no passwords, keys, or personal data in it.

Tolerance for change. Matching is deliberately forgiving of ordinary maintenance. A license keeps working through a replaced network card or disk, and usually through either an operating-system reinstall or a motherboard replacement on its own, because the other identifier still matches. It stops matching on a different server or virtual machine, or when both of those identifiers change together. On some virtual machines the motherboard UUID is not readable, and there an OS reinstall alone is enough to need a new license. Either way, the fix is a re-issued license from the new fingerprint. See Installing a License.

A license can list more than one server, for a primary and a failover.

Checked on your server, not by calling EEI

The product verifies the signature, the dates, the product and the server binding locally, using EEI's public key built into the product. It needs no internet connection and makes no call to EEI to do so, which is why it works in isolated and air-gapped networks.

A connector checks its license when it starts. Installing a new license therefore means restarting the connector, or the Seeq agent that runs it.

What happens at the edges

No license, or the wrong one. The product still starts, logs its license state, and writes the fingerprint file you need to request a license. It does no licensed work until a valid license is in place: a connector registers no datasources. There is no free trial window. An evaluation is a short-term license, issued the same way.

More connections than the license allows. A connector registers enabled connections, in the order they appear in its configuration, up to its licensed capacity. The rest are not registered, and their data does not appear in Seeq. Size the license to every connection you have enabled, plus any you plan to add soon. We confirm the number with you before issuing.

Expiry. There is no grace period. The next time the connector starts after the expiry date, it registers no datasources. So a renewal needs to be installed before the expiry date: ask for it ahead of time. A renewed license installs the same way as the first.

We help you stay ahead of both. We track the expiry date of every license we issue. Where we have access to your Seeq server, we also keep an eye on how many datasources (or metadata sources) your connectors use against their licensed capacity. Either way, we make a best effort to tell you in good time about a change that would affect you, such as a license nearing its expiry or a connection count nearing its limit. Once VirtualForge connectivity is available (planned), a connected product will send those notifications itself, and you will be able to watch capacity and expiry directly in ForgeIQ.

Renewals and changes

A renewal or a change (more capacity, a later expiry, a new feature) is simply a new license file for the same server. It installs the same way, and does not need a new fingerprint unless the server changed. Ask EEI, or your platform partner if you bought through one, and include your server's Host ID, the short code shown in the connector log.

Connected deployments

We plan for products connected to the VirtualForge platform to receive and renew licenses automatically, with no file exchange, managed through ForgeIQ. That is not available yet. Every license today is a file, installed as described in Installing a License.