FastNetMon Advanced licensing logic

In this article you can find details about FastNetMon’s licensing implementation.

When you install FastNetMon for the first time it uses your external and internal IPs (if use NAT) and information about hardware to generate license and store it to /etc/fastnetmon/license.lic.

It uses following hardware details:

CPU model
Number of logical CPUs

If you change any of these hardware options FastNetMon will issue new license automatically (you need to have active Internet connection) when you change it reasonable number of times (few times per week). If you change it so often our support team will contact you and after that we may limit number of allowed hardware assignment changes.

If you’re thinking about changing external or internal IP address, please create ticket to our support team before making any actions. Any IP relate changes will break license allocation process.

For license usage monitoring reasons and product usage survey, all editions of FastNetMon send following information to stats (stats.fastnetmon.com) server.

FastNetMon Advanced does not send any pcap dumps, hosts in your network or any other sensitive information to our servers.

For all production licenses on monthly or annual billings cycle our licensing server issues licenses only for 14 days. Every day FastNetMon contacts licensing server and extends it for one more day until end of per paid period.

During automatic license extension you can check following log messages in /var/log/fastnetmon/fastnetmon.log:

[INFO] Start automatic license refresh process
[INFO] External IP address of this server: aa.bb.cc.dd
[INFO] We have license for: 14 days
[INFO] Correctly received and checked license
[INFO] We store license on disk

To check license status you can use this fcli command:

sudo fcli show license

Production license for 10000 mbits valid until 2023-03-29

There is an option to manually extend license to check that it will work fine after configuration or routing change:

sudo fcli set renew_license

If your license was suspended or cancelled previously you will need to restart FastNetMon to fetch license:

sudo fcli commit

If you machine does not have external connectivity we can allocate offline license which does not require connection to licensing server. If you need this type of license, please discuss it with sales team. These licenses are subject of additional security checks for company and can be issued only for annual licenses.

To generate such license we will need hardware fingerprint which can be generated this way:

 sudo fcli show license_hardware_data > hw_data.lic

After that please send it to our support or sales team and we will provide license file which should be put to /etc/fastnetmon/license.lic.

After placing license file there you will need to restart FastNetMon this way:

sudo fcli commit

And then check license status:

sudo fcli show license

Please be aware that after offline license expiration FastNetMon will stop working and even if you have active subscription with us you will need to reach us to generate new license.

We recommend adding calendar event few weeks before license expiration.