How to check Elasticsearch license history or past activations (Platinum/Enterprise)?

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

Five years ago, one of my customers purchased an Elastic license. The renewal date has now arrived, and they asked me to verify the current license status of their clusters. When I checked, all clusters with GET /_license API call, all have a basic license. My customer shared the invoice for the purchased license, but I couldn’t find any cluster with an active platinum license.

I also contacted the Elastic Turkey sales team, but since the clusters are on-prem, they don’t have any information either.

At this point, I’d at least like to confirm whether the license was ever activated on a cluster. Is there an API call (or another method) to check the license history in Elasticsearch?

Thanks,

2

As far as I know I don't think such API exist, there is no history of license activation.

Does the activation date reflects the creation date of the cluster or is more recent?

The activation dates will change when you revert from a paid license to the basic one.

If the activation date is the same as the deployment of the cluster, then I think it is safe to assume that no license was ever applied.

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3

If you have ES logs, there should be a trace, something like this:
[2025-09-30T15:40:01,727][INFO ][o.e.x.s.a.Realms ] [] license mode is [basic], currently licensed security realms are [reserved/reserved,file/default_file,native/default_native]
[2025-09-30T15:40:01,730][INFO ][o.e.l.ClusterStateLicenseService] [] license [11111111-2222-3333-4444-55555555555] mode [basic] - valid

Most likely there will be no logs before 5 yr, however go in the past as far as possible. Maybe they have zipped logs, in mails, on disk of a local admin, etc.

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