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 facilty 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 Server Account Setup step should be used.
MLA Installation Procedure
Use the Qube Installer to perform the MLA installation, and provide the username and password from the MLS user account.
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.
- 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).
Please note that if PipelineFX has determined that your account is not in good standing, we may de-authorized your metered license account. In this case, your supervisor(s) will enter the Disabled state within 15 minutes. Check the Metering Authorized field in the Account Details section on the MLS website.
