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Licenses

Introduction to licenses​

By default, all environments are unregistered. Also the Deployment Center comes without a Thinkwise Platform license. When an unregistered environment is started, the applications in this environment will not be available. Only the IAM application will be available to IAM administrators.

This applies to:

  • Freshly installed environments without any applications.
  • Development environments containing a Software Factory.
  • Upgraded 2020.1-or-earlier environments with regular applications.

After the initial registration, licenses will be automatically renewed. In this manual, both the initial registration (manually and automatically) and license renewal will be explained.

If problems still occur after following the steps described below, see: Troubleshooting licenses.

note

In this manual, the expression environment denotes an Intelligent Application Manager plus the applications in this IAM and all runtime components attached, such as Indicium Universal, GUI's, etc.

Prerequisites for automatic license renewal​

Automatic license renewal is only possible with:

  • Indicium Universal (as of version 2020.2, check the Lifecycle policy for the most recent support information).
  • Access to and credentials for the Thinkwise Community Portal (TCP).
  • The environment registration and license renewal mechanisms require Indicium Universal to have an active internet connection. There are some scenarios where this is not possible. For instance, in environments that are isolated from the internet or remote environments where the window of opportunity for an active internet connection does not match the license renewal schedule. Please contact your Thinkwise representative if this is the case. A manually installed offline license or a license with a custom renewal schedule can be arranged.

First-time registration​

To be able to use an environment, it must be registered manually once. See: Manual environment registration. After this first time, it will be recognized and registered automatically.

The following message is shown when an environment has not been registered yet:

"Your Thinkwise license has expired. Please contact your system administrator or Thinkwise Innovation B.V."

License expired

Manual environment registration​

An environment has to be registered manually when the license renewal mechanism fails to identify the environment. The main reason is often that it concerns an upgraded 2020.2+ environment or a freshly installed development environment.

When an unregistered environment is started, a message will be shown that manual environment registration is recommended:

"This environment is not registered. Applications are not available because of this. Please register the environment using the menu item 'Register environment' under 'Settings'."

Environment not registered

The registration can be started from the IAM menu:

menu Settings > Register environment

  1. In the Thinkwise Community Portal, login using your regular Thinkwise community credentials.
  2. Follow the steps to register the environment for your company.
note

It can take up to 5 minutes before the registration of the environment is fully processed.

Automatic environment registration​

After the first manual registration, environment registration will be done automatically.

  • Once an environment is registered manually, the license mechanism will automatically match and register any new environment that contains a model that is also present in the registered environment. For instance, when you register a development environment, all Intelligent Application Managers containing applications built in the development environment will automatically be identified and registered to the same company.

  • Synchronizing a model to an empty IAM is another way to register the IAM. Once an application has been created for the model, the IAM will be automatically identified and registered.

note

It can take up to 5 minutes after creating the application for the environment to be registered automatically.

Because of this mechanism, any modification to the IAM environment that causes it to be considered as a new environment will automatically re-register the environment as long as a recognized application is present. For instance, copying or renaming the IAM database will automatically yield a new license based on the applications in this IAM.

Automatic license renewal​

Renewal of the license will be done automatically, following a predefined schedule.

The license is bound to the environment and is non-transferrable. Because of this, changes in the environment can trigger an unscheduled license renewal. This can be a database server update, a rename of the IAM database name or migrating IAM to a different server. Copying an IAM environment will also require a license refresh as the present license will not be valid for the copied environment. The automatic environment registration will kick in as the applications present in IAM can be used to automatically register the new or migrated environment.

If the renewal process is interrupted repeatedly (due to Indicium Universal not running or lack of internet connection), a message is shown to administrators on start-up one month before the license expires. When the license has expired, end-users will also be informed of the expired license.

info

Consult the Indicium Universal log for information about the license status and license renewals.

To only check the current license on startup and skip further checks in the background, see Disable scheduled license update checks.

License endpoints​

Main administrators can use UI and HTTP endpoints to update the license information of their IAM environment without having to log into IAM. See License endpoints.

Troubleshooting licenses​

Consult the Indicium logs to find out more about the status of the current license and the license renewal attempts. The licensing mechanism prints out detailed information.

Indicium log on licenses Example of a log file

License expired or not present​

If a license is about to expire or is missing, a message will be shown to administrators. The ribbon will turn red. Messages will also be shown to the end-users when the license has actually expired or when no license is present. Normally, this should not occur for environments that have been registered, so be sure to check if Indicium Universal is running for the environment.

There are several important settings in the IIS to ensure Indicium Universal is performing the license trades correctly:

  1. Open IIS.
  2. Ensure that the application pool for Indicium Universal does not shut down on inactivity. Set the Idle time-out to 0 minutes instead of the default 20 minutes.
  3. Check in the application pool's Advanced Settings that the StartMode is set to AlwaysRunning (instead of OnDemand). If so, also check if the Application intialization has been enabled.
  4. Check in the Indicium site's Advanced settings that Preload mode is enabled. Note that the Preload feature of IIS will not work correctly if the website only accepts traffic via https, as the preload request is fired on http. A resolution for this problem can be found here.
  5. Check the Indicium.txt logfile if the license has been retrieved.

Indicium won't connect to retrieve a license​

  • Make sure the connection to “licensing.thinkwisesoftware.com” (port 443) is allowed. This is usually only needed when a firewall is blocking outgoing connections, or when using a whitelist for this purpose.
  • If your network uses a proxy server, tell Indicium which proxy to use. For more information, see Internet proxy.

This environment is not registered etc​

If the environment has been registered according to the steps in chapter First-time registration but this message still appears:

"This environment is not registered. Applications are not available because of this. Please register the environment using the menu item 'Register environment' under 'Settings'."

Environment not registered

Check in IAM if the license key has been entered:

Menu Settings > Global settings

  1. Check in field License if a key has been entered.

  2. If so, run this statement on the relevant database:

    update global_settings
    set license = null

  3. Restart the IIS service.

License key License key in IAM

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