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Question

Licensing, Online vs. Offline

  • December 3, 2024
  • 3 replies
  • 103 views
S

Hi,

I stumbled on the following instruction reading the documentation for the Postgres Connector:

 

I don’t understand.

Does online license and offline license have to be understood as, respectively, “SaaS” and “on premise”? I wouldn’t say so, but ?

Else, if it’s about the way the license validity is checked, then why the nature of this verification would change the way a Connector Pack has to be installed? Do any other non-intuitive things like this are already present or are to be awaited in future releases?

Do you have a list of what « online licensing »  implies for the way Centreon behaves? I remember I’ve been told back then it was introduced, that it’s a matter of checking the licence validity, and only that. I’m afraid I’ve been lied to about the real purpose of this functionality. 

Can someone explain me what means this part of the documentation?

3 replies

lpinsivy
Centreonian
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  • lpinsivy
  • Centreonian
  • December 6, 2024

Hi ​@Stéphane, thank you for your feeback.

With Centreon their is 2 type of license: off-line and on-line. For example IT-100 license is on-line.

If you have on-line license, you can go directly in “Configuration > Monitoring Connectors Management” to install and update your connectors.

If you have an off-line license, you must first install/update connectors using DNF or APT.

If will forward your feedback to our documentation team.

Regards

C
Centreonian
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  • cg-tw
  • Centreonian
  • December 6, 2024

Hello ​@Stéphane 

You may want to read this page https://docs.centreon.com/docs/23.04/administration/licenses/#types-of-licenses

Regards

S
  • Stéphane
  • Author
  • December 6, 2024

Hi ​@Stéphane, thank you for your feeback.

With Centreon their is 2 type of license: off-line and on-line. For example IT-100 license is on-line.

If you have on-line license, you can go directly in “Configuration > Monitoring Connectors Management” to install and update your connectors.

If you have an off-line license, you must first install/update connectors using DNF or APT.

If will forward your feedback to our documentation team.

Regards

Thank you for your answer.

I hadn’t noticed so far that the Monitoring Connector Manager was different between our platform which use the online licence and the one with an offline licence. But as you tell it actually is.

Does that mean, in the case of an online licence (and with “Automatic installation of plugins” being set to  “off”), either that the centreon-pack-* package are automatically installed when plugins are installed via the Monitoring Connector Manager,  or that the templates/rules/etc… for the plugins are gathered in another way then? Thus the centreon-pack-* packages aren’t needed anymore?

Another question, still in case of the use of an online licence, is there any way (besides going back to an offline licence) to prevent this automatic update to take place? While this is clearly a handy functionality, probably for most use cases, it could also have some potential drawbacks. In my case, without this feature it’s possible to spot an possible oversight of upgrading the packs after a platform upgrade, whereas with the feature enabled, seeing available new plugin versions  may be both an actual oversight or a new version which has been made available in the period. Also, a user/technician with access to the connector manager may trigger the upgrade thinking doing the right thing, although it could be undesirable and has some negative impacts on the service.  Yes, this is mostly a matter of organization then, but experience has taught me any safeguard is a good thing most of the time.

Last thing, as I already said I’m not fond with the fact that Centreon behaves differently for quite unrelated features according to the licence type. Obviously online licence validation requires the central being able to reach the Internet. But I do not see any reason to assume this is true to add more online dependent functionalities, particularly for a monitoring platform. As you probably already know, such monitoring platform can possibly be highly needed/useful during of degraded situation of the network, which could imply Internet to become unreachable then.
It is quite obvious that if this absence of connection has any negative impact on the monitoring solution itself, it is a big fail.

Let’s consider the following event :

 - Internet isn’t accessible no more.
 - But an up-to-date local mirror of RPM packages still is.
 - It appears that troubleshooting of the global issue could benefit from the installation of a connector which is not installed so far.

Then, is the possibility to install the plugin and its related pack from the local mirror still exists in both cases (ie: with online or offline licence)?

 Have a nice day.
 

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