Licensing and entitlements¶

Overview¶

The License and Entitlements page provides a unified view of your F5 Insight license status, validity, and storage consumption. Use this page to monitor your entitlements and track storage utilization across telemetry data and application logs.

Benefits and key features¶

License visibility — Quickly verify your license status, expiration date, and operating mode from a single dashboard.
Storage monitoring — Track real-time storage consumption to understand capacity utilization and plan accordingly.
Capacity planning — View storage breakdown by data type using current and historical data to identify growth trends and anticipate future needs.

Access license information¶

In the left toolbar, go to the Manage section.
Select License and Entitlements.

License information¶

Field	Description
Status	Current license state (Active, Expired, and so on)
Valid until	License expiration date
Mode	Connection mode (Connected or Disconnected)

License modes¶

Connected — F5 Insight validates your license against F5 cloud services with outbound connectivity to F5 licensing endpoints.
1. F5 Insight generates a license report containing required host and license data.
2. The license report is sent automatically to the F5 licensing server for validation.
3. The F5 licensing server returns a signed license report that entitles the device.
Disconnected — Uses the same validation workflow for air-gapped environments, but data transfer is manual.
1. F5 Insight generates the same license report containing required host and license data.
2. You manually transfer and submit the license report to the F5 licensing server from a connected system (using a tool like Postman or curl).
3. You manually upload the signed license report returned by F5 back to the device to complete entitlement.
Note

A helper tool is available to assist with the manual transfer and submission process for disconnected workflows. See the Disconnected mode helper tool section below for details.

Licensing workflows and best practices¶

This section describes common licensing lifecycle scenarios and recommended actions for each.

Extending trial licenses¶

Trial licenses are limited to 30 days. F5 Insight does not enforce this limit in 1.x.x or the upcoming 2.0.x releases, so the product continues to function after the trial expires.

If you need more time for evaluation, let your trial license expire. Do not deactivate and reactivate it to extend the evaluation period. Future releases will enforce trial license expiration, so F5 recommends obtaining a long-term paid subscription.

Important

If your trial license has expired, contact F5 Support for assistance in removing the expired trial before activating a paid license. Known issues can also cause an active trial license to become deactivated. If this occurs, contact F5 Support to resolve the issue before proceeding.

Migrating from trial to paid license¶

When you are ready to move from a trial license to a paid license, let the trial expire rather than deactivating it. Contact F5 Support to remove the expired trial before activating the paid license.

Trial-to-paid license workflow¶
License state	Next action
Trial active	Allow the trial to expire. Do not deactivate it.
Trial expired	Contact F5 Support to remove the expired trial.
Trial removed	After F5 Support confirms you can proceed, activate your paid license.
Paid license active	Monitor your license status on the License and Entitlements page.

Steps:

Allow your trial license to expire. Do not select Deactivate on the trial license.
Contact F5 Support for assistance in removing the expired trial. If the trial has already expired, start with this step.
Wait for F5 Support to confirm that the trial license has been removed and you can proceed.
Go to the License and Entitlements page.
Select Activate and choose your paid JSON Web Token (JWT).

Important

If a known issue deactivates your trial license while it is still active, contact F5 Support to resolve the issue before proceeding with paid license activation.

Moving devices between environments¶

When migrating a device from one environment to another (for example, staging to production), deactivate the license on the old device and activate it on the new device to avoid double billing.

Device migration workflow¶
Step	Old Device (Source)	New Device (Destination)
Pre-migration	License: Active	JWT available
Action	Deactivate license	—
Activate	—	Activate using same JWT
Result	No license	License: Active

Licensing in disaster recovery setups¶

In a disaster recovery (DR) deployment with a primary and standby F5 Insight instance, activate the license only on the primary device. The standby instance does not require a separate license activation.

When you promote the standby instance to primary (failover):

The promoted instance inherits the license from the replicated configuration.
The license remains active on the newly promoted primary device.
After you repair and restore the original primary to standby role, you do not need to reactivate licensing.

For more information, see Configure disaster recovery.

Deactivation requirements and constraints¶

Before deactivating a license, ensure the following requirements are met:

Important

Do not deactivate a trial license to extend your evaluation or migrate to a paid license. Follow the Extending trial licenses or Migrating from trial to paid license guidance instead.

Requirement	Details
Device online	The device must have outbound connectivity to F5 licensing servers at the time of deactivation.
Disconnected mode handshake	If using disconnected licensing, you must complete the manual report submission workflow after deactivation.

Deactivation workflow for connected mode:

Navigate to the License and Entitlements page.
Verify the device has outbound connectivity to F5 licensing servers.
Select Deactivate on the active license JWT.
F5 Insight sends a deactivation request to the F5 licensing server.
Deactivation is confirmed; the license transitions to inactive.

Deactivation workflow for disconnected mode:

In disconnected licensing mode, deactivation requires manual submission to the F5 licensing server:

Navigate to the License and Entitlements page.
Select Deactivate on the active license JWT.
F5 Insight generates a deactivation report.
Manually transfer the deactivation report to the F5 licensing server from a connected system.
1. Use the helper tool or API to submit the report (see Disconnected mode licensing tool).
2. The F5 licensing server returns a signed acknowledgment.
Upload the signed acknowledgment back to the device to complete the deactivation workflow.

Important

For disconnected licensing deactivation to complete successfully, you must receive and upload the signed acknowledgment from the F5 licensing server. Without this step, the device remains in a transitional state.

Storage¶

The storage section provides a real-time overview of data consumption against your licensed capacity.

Storage metrics¶

Metric	Description
Storage in use	Total storage currently consumed
Licensed storage	Maximum storage included in your license
Available storage	Remaining capacity

Storage breakdown by data type¶

Storage consumption is categorized by:

Telemetry data — Metrics and performance data collected from BIG-IP devices.
Application logs — Log data ingested from your BIG-IP fleet.

Storage retention behavior¶

When storage utilization reaches capacity, F5 Insight automatically rolls over data by deleting the oldest records to make room for new incoming data. An in-app alert notifies you when storage limits are reached, so you can review consumption and adjust data collection as needed. Contact your F5 account team to increase data storage.

Disconnected mode helper tool¶

For disconnected workflows, you can use the helper app documented here:

Disconnected mode licensing tool

Appendix: Licensing communication examples¶

The following examples are synthetic decoded JSON Web Token (JWT) samples based on the structure of real licensing traffic. Values are illustrative only.

Connected and disconnected data exchange¶

Outbound from device to licensing service: license report JWT.
Inbound from licensing service to device: signed entitlement manifest JWT.

Synthetic example: Decoded license report JWT (outbound)¶

This example represents the decoded JWT from a local license-report-YYYY-MM-DD.json file sent for validation.

{
  "header": {
    "alg": "HS256",
    "typ": "JWT"
  },
  "payload": {
    "payload": {
      "documentType": "F5Insight Telemetry",
      "documentVersion": "1",
      "reportType": "initialize",
      "reportName": "f5insight-init-<synthetic-report-id>",
      "digitalAssetId": "<synthetic-asset-id>",
      "digitalAssetName": "f5insight",
      "digitalAssetVersion": "1.0.0-<build>",
      "customerProvidedId": "",
      "observationStartTime": "2026-03-09T23:28:18Z",
      "observationEndTime": "2026-03-09T23:29:18Z",
      "telemetryRecords": [
        {
          "metricName": "insight_aidf_allowance",
          "modeValue": 1
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

Synthetic example: Decoded signed entitlement manifest JWT (inbound)¶

This example represents the decoded JWT from a returned license-manifest-YYYY-MM-DD.json file uploaded back to the device.

{
  "header": {
    "alg": "RS512",
    "kid": "v1",
    "jku": "https://product.apis.f5.com/ee/v1/keys/jwks"
  },
  "payload": {
    "documentType": "F5Insight Telemetry",
    "documentVersion": "1",
    "reportType": "initialize",
    "reportName": "f5insight-init-<synthetic-report-id>",
    "digitalAssetId": "<synthetic-asset-id>",
    "telemetryRecords": [
      {
        "metricName": "insight_aidf_allowance",
        "modeValue": 1
      }
    ],
    "entitlement": {
      "compliance": {
        "digitalAssetComplianceStatus": "valid",
        "entitlementCheckStatus": "valid",
        "telemetryStatus": "valid"
      },
      "entitledFeatures": [
        {
          "featureFlag": "insight_data_storage_gb",
          "featurePermitted": 5000,
          "featureValueType": "integral"
        },
        {
          "featureFlag": "insight_aidf_allowance",
          "featurePermitted": 1,
          "featureValueType": "boolean"
        }
      ],
      "entitlementMetadata": {
        "entitlementExpiryDate": "2027-01-30T00:21:21Z",
        "telemetryFrequency": 10080
      }
    }
  }
}

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