The License Portal Has Been Contacted

I see this message every hour on the hour. Is there a reason it has to call home so frequently? What happens if it cannot for some reason?

Not a big deal but it seems a little odd.

  • Tudor.Popescu
    Hi Corrigun:
    The license Portal is an integral part of your Rapid Recovery deployment.

    Contacting the license portal acts like a "heart beat". If the license portal cannot be contacted, the core enters in a "grace period" of 10 days (last time I checked). It is expected that during this period the connection to the license portal will be re-established.

    Please find below some more information for the license portal (extracted from the RR documentation):

    The License Portal server is a Web portal that resides at a managed hosting location and provides around-the-clock support and availability.

    The License Portal server controls access to product downloads and allows you to track AppAssure deployments, view reports, and manage licenses.

    The general workflow for using the License Portal is as follows:

    The Rapid Recovery Core Console frequently contacts the portal server to remain current with any changes made in the Dell Data Protection | Rapid Recovery License Portal.

    For non-trial licenses, the Rapid Recovery Core contacts the license portal once every hour. If the Core cannot reach the license portal after a 10-day grace period, the Core stops taking snapshots.

    Typically, communication with the license portal server occurs automatically at designated intervals; however, you can initiate communication on-demand.

    A user registers on the License Portal and creates an account.
    • During the registration process, the License Portal automatically creates a default root group for the account and gives it a name.
    • When the user logs on, the License Portal represents the user as an account for that session.
    • For each account, a groups page displays all of the user's groups. A managed service provider can, for example, create separate groups for each customer and then create subgroups to further segregate agents and cores. The user can also use groups to view all cores and agents when logging on to the License Portal.
    • A user can generate reports for each account to view different statistics, which can be helpful when managing customers. For more information, see the topic, Working with License Portal Reports.
    • A user with administrative rights can also edit licenses at subgroup levels.

    Hope that this helps
  • Corrigun

    In reply to Tudor.Popescu:

    So I had already read most of that but still am not sure why it needs to call home every hour. None of those reasons are really very compelling. Up to the hour license portal changes? I can wait until tomorrow. I'm pretty sure once a day/week would accomplish the same thing.
  • Tim Seymour

    In reply to Corrigun:

    The rate of License Portal contact was designed with certain features in mind for some of our larger customers. The Licnese Portal gives you the ability to grant additional licenses to sub-customers (if you are an MSP), disable agents from backup, check status, etc. all from the License Portal which is accessible from the Internet. In many instances MSPs or other large customers may not have direct or immediate access to a core server. So to speed the process of those changes propogating down to a core we set the heart beat for the core to 1 hour. That way MSPs don't have to manually go to each core to force a contact to make their changes take effect quickly. The rate of contact is not too quick that it causes unnecessary overhead, but it's fast enough that a change is realized efficiently in that sort of situation. The check takes very little time and very little overhead on a core server. Other than the notification (which you can turn off in notification settings) you shouldn't even notice it.
  • Corrigun

    In reply to Tim Seymour:

    That makes more sense and like I said it doesn't really bother me it just seemed a little aggressive.