Manual license utilization reporting

Manual license utilization reporting allows you to export, review, and send license utilization data to HashiCorp via the CLI or HCP Web Portal. Use these reports to understand how much more you can deploy under your current contract, protect against overutilization, and budget for predicted consumption. Manual reporting shares the minimum data required to validate license utilization as defined in our contracts. The reports consist of mostly computed metrics and will never contain Personal Identifiable Information (PII) or other sensitive information.

Manual license utilization shares the same data as automated license utilization but is more time consuming. Unless you are running in an air-gapped environment or have another reason to report data manually, we strongly recommend using automated reporting instead. If you have disabled automated license reporting, you can re-enable it by reversing the opt-out process described in the documentation.

If you are considering manual reporting because you’re worried about your data, we strongly recommend that you review the example payloads, which are the same for automated and manual reporting. If you have further concerns with any of the automatically-reported data please bring them to your account manager before opting out of automated reporting in favor of manual reporting.

How to manually send data reports

Generate a data bundle

Data bundles include collections of JSON snapshots that contain license utilization information.

1. Login into your cluster node.

2. Run this CLI command to generate a data bundle:

   $ vault operator utilization
   

   By default, the bundle will include all historical snapshots.

   You can provide context about the conditions under which the report was generated and submitted by providing a comment. This optional comment will not be included in the license utilization bundle, but will be included in the Vault server logs.

   Example:

   $ vault operator utilization -message=”Change Control 654987” \
        -output=”/utilization/reports/latest.json”
   

   This command will export all the persisted snapshots into a bundle. The message “Change Control 654987” will not be included in the bundle but will be included in Vault server logs. The -output flags specifies the output location of the JSON bundle.

   Available command flags:

   • -message (string: “”) - Provide context about the conditions under which the report was generated and submitted. This message is not included in the license utilization bundle but will be included in the vault server logs. (optional)

   • -today-only (bool: false) - To include only today’s snapshot, no historical snapshots. If no snapshots were persisted in the last 24 hrs, it takes a snapshot and exports it to a bundle. (optional)

   • -output (string: “”) - Specifies the output path for the bundle. Defaults to a time-based generated file name. (optional)

Send the data bundle to HashiCorp

1. Go to https://portal.cloud.hashicorp.com/license-utilization/reports/create

2. Click on Choose files, or drop your file(s) into the container.

   a. If the upload succeeded, the HCP user interface will change the file status to Uploaded in green.

   b. If the upload failed, the file status will say Failed in red, and will include error information.

If the upload fails make sure you haven’t modified the file signature. If the error persists, please contact your account representative.

Enable manual reporting

Upgrade to a release that supports manual license utilization reporting. These releases include:

• Vault Enterprise 1.16.0 and later
• Vault Enterprise 1.15.6 and later
• Vault Enterprise 1.14.10 and later

Configuration

Administrators can manage disk space for storing snapshots by defining the number of days snapshots can be retained.

reporting {
    snapshot_retention_time = "2400h"
}

The default retention period is 400 days.

Data file content

{
  "snapshot_version": 2,
  "id": "0001JWAY00BRF8TEXC9CVRHBAC",
  "timestamp": "2024-02-08T16:55:28.085215-08:00",
  "schema_version": "2.0.0",
  "product": "vault",
  "process_id": "01HP5NJS21HN50FY0CBS0SYGCH",
  "metrics": {
    "clientcount.current_month_estimate.type.acme_client": {
      "key": "clientcount.current_month_estimate.type.acme_client",
      "value": 0,
      "mode": "write"
    },
    "clientcount.current_month_estimate.type.entity": {
      "key": "clientcount.current_month_estimate.type.entity",
      "value": 20,
      "mode": "write"
    },
    "clientcount.current_month_estimate.type.nonentity": {
      "key": "clientcount.current_month_estimate.type.nonentity",
      "value": 11,
      "mode": "write"
    },
    "clientcount.current_month_estimate.type.secret_sync": {
      "key": "clientcount.current_month_estimate.type.secret_sync",
      "value": 0,
      "mode": "write"
    },
    "clientcount.previous_month_complete.type.acme_client": {
      "key": "clientcount.previous_month_complete.type.acme_client",
      "value": 0,
      "mode": "write"
    },
    "clientcount.previous_month_complete.type.entity": {
      "key": "clientcount.previous_month_complete.type.entity",
      "value": 0,
      "mode": "write"
    },
    "clientcount.previous_month_complete.type.nonentity": {
      "key": "clientcount.previous_month_complete.type.nonentity",
      "value": 0,
      "mode": "write"
    },
    "clientcount.previous_month_complete.type.secret_sync": {
      "key": "clientcount.previous_month_complete.type.secret_sync",
      "value": 0,
      "mode": "write"
    }
  },
  "product_version": "1.16.0+ent",
  "license_id": "7d68b16a-74fe-3b9f-a1a7-08cf461fff1c",
  "checksum": 6861637915450723051,
  "metadata": {
    "billing_start": "2023-05-04T00:00:00Z",
    "cluster_id": "16d0ff5b-9d40-d7a7-384c-c9b95320c60e"
  }