Purpose of the Metered License Agent (MLA).

The Metered License Agent (MLA) is a utility running at your facility which collects data from your supervisor and sends it to the Metered License Server (MLS).  It may run inside your facility, on a host outside your firewall in a DMZ, or anywhere that can reach both your supervisor and the MLS on the public internet.

It samples the license usage from your supervisor once a minute and stores it locally in a batch.  When it accumulates at least 15 records, it will transmit the batch of records to the MLS for storage.

Metered License Agent Installation Host

The MLA can be installed on any machine in your facility which:

• has the qube-core package installed
• can reach the supervisor service on the supervisor host
• can reach the public internet

The most common installation scenarios

• Install the MLA on your supervisor.  Your supervisor must be able to access the public internet
• Install the MLA on another machine in your facility. A machine already running a license server is a good candidate
• Install the MLA on a host in your firewall's DMZ.  The firewall rules can be restricted to:
  • inbound TCP port 50001 to the supervisor
  • outbound TCP port 443 on metered.pipelinefx.com

MLA login credentials

The MLA needs login credentials on the Metered License Server (MLS) in order to ensure that the reported data is associated with the correct Billing Account on the MLS.  The username and password you created during the PipelineFX Metered License Portal Account Setup step should be used.

MLA Installation Procedure

On Windows and OS X hosts, we recommend using the Qube Installer to perform the MLA installation, and provide the username and password from the MLS user account.

MLA installation from RPM on linux

Many linux machines do not have a graphics head on them, and so installation must be done using the command line and installing directly from the RPM.  This will necessitate setting up the credentials file and cron job by hand.

For a list of command-line arguments to the MLA, see Metered License Agent Advanced Usage.

[root@ip-192-168-66-21 /tmp]# rpm -ivh qube-mla-6.9-2.CENTOS_6.7.x86_64.rpm
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
   1:qube-mla               ########################################### [100%]
[root@ip-192-168-66-21 /tmp]# 

[root@ip-192-168-66-21 ~]# cat /root/.mla_creds 
export PFX_MLS_USER=<your MLS user name>
export PFX_MLS_PASSWD=<your MLS password>

[root@ip-192-168-66-21 ~]# chmod 600 /root/.mla_creds

sh-4.1# . /root/.mla_creds 
 
sh-4.1# /usr/local/pfx/qube/mla/mla --check-creds --debug
[2017-04-10 16:29:42] john.burk:axxxxxxf at https://mls.pipelinefx.com/api/v2/login
[2017-04-10 16:29:43] Credentials test passed.  Exiting...

sh-4.1# /usr/local/pfx/qube/mla/mla --check --debug
[2017-04-10 16:33:06] Testing supervisor connectivity...
[2017-04-10 16:33:06] Qube supervisor defined in qb.conf: 192.168.66.21
[2017-04-10 16:33:06] - passed
[2017-04-10 16:33:06] Testing Metered License Server login credentials...
[2017-04-10 16:33:06] john.burk:axxxxxxf at https://mls.pipelinefx.com/api/v2/login
[2017-04-10 16:33:07] - passed
[2017-04-10 16:33:07] Testing MAC address registration and authorization...
[2017-04-10 16:33:07] - passed
[2017-04-10 16:33:07] All checks passed.  Exiting...

sh-4.1# ls -l /etc/cron.d/com.pipelinefx.meteredLicenseAgent.cron
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 107 Apr 10 16:40 /etc/cron.d/com.pipelinefx.meteredLicenseAgent.cron

sh-4.1# cat /etc/cron.d/com.pipelinefx.meteredLicenseAgent.cron 
MAILTO=''
* * * * *       root    . /root/.mla_creds && /usr/local/pfx/qube/mla/mla --debug --records 1
 

sh-4.1# /etc/init.d/crond restart

 sh-4.1# tail /var/log/mlalog
[2017-04-10 16:41:01] Local journal not found, creating database PFX_metered.db
[2017-04-10 16:41:01] Created database PFX_metered.db
[2017-04-10 16:41:01] License data: used:0, prepaid:64, metered:0
[2017-04-10 16:41:01] Records collected so far: 1
[2017-04-10 16:41:01] john.burk:axxxxxxf at https://mls.pipelinefx.com/api/v2/login
[2017-04-10 16:41:02] POST'ing records to MLS at https://mls.pipelinefx.com/api/v2/records
[2017-04-10 16:41:02] Reporting {"insert": 1, "account": "jburk testing", "metered_key": "[metered]\nhostid = 02:EF:66:EF:90:97\nlicensee = \"jburk testing\"\nmax = 32\nexpires = \"Apr 11, 2017 00:41:02\"\nkey = 32450283602d5539f0d5f072cef69276", "update": 0, "authorized": true}
[2017-04-10 16:41:02] Removed all POST'ed records from table license_data
[2017-04-10 16:41:02] "[metered]\nhostid = 02:EF:66:EF:90:97\nlicensee = \"jburk testing\"\nmax = 32\nexpires = \"Apr 11, 2017 00:41:02\"\nkey = 32450283602d5539f0d5f072cef69276"
[2017-04-10 16:41:02] Supervisor authorized for metered licensing: true

sh-4.1# cat /etc/cron.d/com.pipelinefx.meteredLicenseAgent.cron 
MAILTO=''
* * * * *       root    . /root/.mla_creds && /usr/local/pfx/qube/mla/mla > /dev/null 2>&1

Verifying the MLA Installation

After you've installed the MLA, login to the MLS at https://metered.pipelinefx.com, and periodically check the "Status" value in the Supervisor section.  

Image Added

• a status of No Records indicates that the MLA has never reported data for this supervisor.
• if the status is Active and remains that way for at least 20 minutes, then your MLA is properly reporting license usage data back to the MLS.
• a Warning status indicates that the MLS has received data from your MLA, but not in the last 15 minutes.
  • This usually indicates that the initial installation of the MLA proceeded without error, but that it is not continuing to collect and report data after that time.
• if the supervisor status continues to degrade from Warning to Critical to Disabled, then the MLA has not reported data for at least 4 or 8 hours, respectively.  In this case, you should check it the Metered License Agent is still running every minute, it's likely that the cron (linux), scheduled task (Windows), or launchd plist (OS X) doesn't have the correct credentials (user name and password).

See Also

Metered License Agent Advanced Usage