About Customers
This topic provides an overview of customer licenses, including information about license types, the Customers page in the vendor portal, and how Replicated uses the customer entitlement information that you provide in license files.
Overview of Customer Licenses
Each customer that you create in the Replicated vendor portal has a unique license file. The customer uploads this license file to the Replicated admin console when they install or update your application.
They can also update, or sync, the license file from the admin console. For more information, see Updating licenses in the Enterprise documentation.
Each customer license includes several fields that uniquely identify the customer and the application, specify the release channel, and define the entitlement information about the customer.
Entitlement information describes the details of the license, such as if the license has an expiration date.
Replicated securely delivers these entitlements to the application and makes them available in the Kubernetes manifest files or at runtime using the Replicated admin console API.
License Types
Each customer license includes a license_type field. The type of customer defined
by the license_type field is used solely for reporting purposes. A customer's
access to your application is not affected by the type that you assign.
The possible values for the license_type field are development, trial, paid, and
community. For more information about each type, see About Customer License Types.
Built-in and Custom License Fields
Each customer license file has several built-in fields. Built-in fields are reserved field names. You can specify the values for these fields to define entitlements for the customer.
For example, there are built-in license fields that define the license expiration date, the customer name, the application slug value, and whether air gap installations are supported.
For more information about built-in fields, see About Built-in License Fields.
You can also create custom license fields. Custom license fields are useful when there are entitlements specific to the customer.
For example, you can create a custom license field to limit the number of active users permitted. Or, you can create a field that specifies the domain on which the customer can run the application.
For more information about creating custom license fields, see Managing Custom License Fields and Referencing Custom License Fields.
License Expiration Handling
The built-in expires_at license field defines the expiration date for a customer license. When you set an expiration date in the vendor portal, the expires_at field is set to midnight UTC on the date selected.
By default, an application with an expired license continues to run, but is prevented from receiving updates. To change the behavior of your application when a license expires, you can can add custom logic based on the values for the expires_at field.
License Archival
When you archive a license in the vendor portal, it is hidden in the default license search and becomes read-only. Archival does not affect the utility of license files downloaded before the change.
To expire a license, set an expiration date and policy before archiving. This is a convenience feature for how licenses are displayed in the vendor portal.
About the Customers Page
The Replicated vendor portal Customers page displays details about each customer license that you create, including the channel the customer is assigned, the type of license, the number of active application instances installed with the license, and more.
The following shows an example of the Customers page:
View a larger version of this image
From the Customers page, you can do the following:
Create new customers
Download a CSV file with details about each customer
View insights about the adoption rate of each version of your application across your customers. For more information, see Adoption Rate (Beta).
Click the Manage customer button to edit details such as the customer name and email, the custom license fields assigned to the customer, and the license expiration policy.
Download the license file for each customer
Click the Customer reporting button to view data about the active application instances associated with each customer. For more information, see Customer Reporting.
View instance details for each customer, including the version of the application that this instance is running, the Kubernetes distribution of the cluster, the last check-in time, and more:
Archive customers