License clarification

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

We have a platinum license that will expire in Oct 2024. We are running 6.8 and plan to upgrade to 7.17. This upgrade will be a 2 step process: 6.8 > 7.3 > 7.17

I upgraded from 6.8 to 7.3 with the platinum license. I deleted the license using curl -X DELETE "localhost:9200/_license?pretty" and now I see this on the node:

[2024-08-14T21:13:20,816][INFO ][o.e.l.LicenseService     ] [usw2c-e62feb63-es-search-monitoring-eap-master-sre] license [TOMBSTONE] mode [trial] - valid
[2024-08-14T21:13:20,835][WARN ][o.e.l.LicenseService     ] [usw2c-e62feb63-es-search-monitoring-eap-master-sre] LICENSE [EXPIRED] ON [THURSDAY, JANUARY 01, 1970].
# IF YOU HAVE A NEW LICENSE, PLEASE UPDATE IT. OTHERWISE, PLEASE REACH OUT TO
# YOUR SUPPORT CONTACT.
# 
# COMMERCIAL PLUGINS OPERATING WITH REDUCED FUNCTIONALITY
# - security
#  - Cluster health, cluster stats and indices stats operations are blocked
#  - All data operations (read and write) continue to work
# - watcher
#  - PUT / GET watch APIs are disabled, DELETE watch API continues to work
#  - Watches execute and write to the history
#  - The actions of the watches don't execute
# - monitoring
#  - The agent will stop collecting cluster and indices metrics
#  - The agent will stop automatically cleaning indices older than [xpack.monitoring.history.duration]
# - graph
#  - Graph explore APIs are disabled
# - ml
#  - Machine learning APIs are disabled
# - logstash
#  - Logstash will continue to poll centrally-managed pipelines
# - beats
#  - Beats will continue to poll centrally-managed configuration
# - deprecation
#  - Deprecation APIs are disabled
# - upgrade
#  - Upgrade API is disabled
# - sql
#  - SQL support is disabled
# - rollup
#  - Creating and Starting rollup jobs will no longer be allowed.
#  - Stopping/Deleting existing jobs, RollupCaps API and RollupSearch continue to function.
[2024-08-14T21:13:20,852][INFO ][o.e.h.AbstractHttpServerTransport] [usw2c-e62feb63-es-search-monitoring-eap-master-sre] publish_address {10.27.2.18:9200}, bound_addresses {[::]:9200}
[2024-08-14T21:13:20,852][INFO ][o.e.n.Node               ] [usw2c-e62feb63-es-search-monitoring-eap-master-sre] started

My understanding is it should have fallen back to free/basic license instead of tombstone per this change but the license is empty:

# curl -k http://localhost:9200/_license
{ }

I am trying to understand how the license would work. If I upgrade my clusters all the way to 7.17, what happens when the platinum license expires? Should it by default fall back to free & cause no interruptions(assuming I am not using the licensed features) or is there a manual step to make sure the license changes to free?

Thanks!

2

Added license

3

GitHub is down at the moment, but as far as I can tell the issue you link to was a change in 7.7.0
There's no reason to expect 7.3 to display the behaviour you're asking about.

Why?
What do you hope to achieve by going via v7.3 ?

4

Client upgrades are handled by a different team and that is the path they insist on taking.

So if I goto 7.17 and my license expires, it should default to Free and I should not see the logs related to licensing?

5

No. If you let the license expire then you will have an expired license rather than a free license.
If you want to downgrade to a free license, then you should call the Start Basic License API

6

thank you! That was helpful :slight_smile: