How is nProbe Licensed?

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nProbe has been traditionally split in core and plugins in order to create a modular application. The disadvantage is that many people was lost with core and plugin licenses and thus we have decided to simplify the offer as follows:

  • End-of-Life Version
    • nProbe Standard
      This version is no longer available.
    • Individual nProbe plugins
      In order to simply the offering, individual plugins are no longer available. The Enterprise M version includes all available plugins.
  • No License Changes
    • nProbe Pro
      No changes.
  • License Rebrand
    • nProbe Enterprise S
      This is the new name of the former nProbe Pro with DNS, HTTP. In the enterprise S edition we have also included the NetFlow-Lite plugin at no cost.
  • New Versions
    • nProbe Enterprise M/L
      Those are new versions of nProbe Pro that include all plugins. Please refer to the product page for the full comparison table reporting the differences between each version.

FAQ

  • Q. What can I do if I hit a license limit (e.g. too many devices from which flows will be collected)?
    A. You can start multiple nProbe instances on the same box to overcome the limit. This is a good practice as you can exploit multicore architectures and reducing the nProbe NetFlow template workload when sending flows to a single nProbe instance.
  • Q. Why did you set a limit in terms of collector devices in this release?
    A. We did it because people sometimes collects with a single nProbe instance from many different routers putting a lot of pressure on a single nProbe instance. Better to split the load on multiple nProbe instances.
  • Q. Do I need extra licenses for simultaneously running multiple nProbe instances on the same box?
    A. No the license is per host, regardless of the number of concurrent instances.

Notes

  • License prices are unchanged: this is just a reduction of the number of versions available.
  • We have added bonus features and free upgrade without a price change, while simplifying versioning.
  • nProbe 9.4 standard licenses will be automatically upgraded to nProbe Pro free of charge: the new nProbe 9.4.x (and up) version will interpret the standard license as Pro.
  • Purchasing maintenance for the former existing standard or plugin licenses, requires manual handling. Please contact us and specify the orderId for which you require license maintenance assistance.
  • Pre-9.4 nProbe Pro customers with valid maintenance can contact us (reporting the orderId of their license) to have a free upgrade to a less restricted version (as in pre 9.4) even though they should be aware that the load balancing issue reported above needs to be considered for performance reasons.