Licensing

Prelude Collector ships ready to run. The free tier is built in: no license key, no portal contact, no online activation step. You install the collector, point it at your devices, and it starts collecting.

This page covers three things, in the order you will need them:

1. The free tier and what it includes.
2. When you have to register your instance with the Arolo Customer Portal.
3. When you need a paid license and how to install one.

Free tier

A fresh collector runs on the free tier by default. It allows up to 20 active devices, with full access to every protocol, model, transform, and output backend. Nothing is gated behind a paid plan beyond capacity.

When you try to enable a 21st device, the collector blocks the operation and returns:

free tier device limit reached (20/20) — configure a license key
for more devices

Disabling a device frees a slot. Only active devices count against the limit; archived or disabled records do not.

Registering with the Customer Portal

You can run the collector for up to 3 months without registering your instance with the Arolo Customer Portal. Use that window to install, evaluate, and roll out the collector at your own pace. After 3 months, an unregistered instance switches to a read-only period — collection stops until you register.

These docs are the public area of the Arolo Customer Portal — the same site you register the instance from. To register:

1. Click Sign in at the top right of this page, using the credentials you received from Arolo.
2. Go to Instances → Register a new instance.
3. Copy the registration key the portal gives you and paste it into the collector's licensing settings.

Registration is what links your free-tier instance to your account so you can see usage in one place, and you can upgrade to a paid plan without reinstalling.

Paid license keys

Buy a license when you need more than 20 devices. Licenses are issued by the Prelude support team — contact the address on the Support page with:

• The hostname or stable identifier of the host running the collector.
• The number of Devices you intend to collect from.
• Whether the deployment is for evaluation, staging, or production.

Once you have a license key, on the next validation cycle the collector contacts the portal, confirms the key, and raises the device cap to your purchased quantity.

You can verify the active license at any time:

curl -s https://collector.example.com/api/v1/license \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN"

Bruno: 01 Auth and Health / License

License expiry

A paid license has a fixed expiry date. The collector exposes the expiry through GET /api/v1/license (the expires-at field) and the web UI's licensing page, and logs warnings on startup as the date approaches. Wire your monitoring to either of those — there is no Prometheus expiry metric.

When a paid license expires, the collector enters a multi-stage wind-down so you have time to renew without dropping data:

• 30-day grace period — every Subscription keeps running exactly as before. Renew during this window and nothing changes on the data plane.
• 365-day read-only period — after the grace period, the collector deactivates active Subscriptions and stops collecting. The API still serves historical Snapshots and configuration so you can keep dashboards alive while you renew.
• Past read-only — the license is treated as fully expired. Renew or contact support.

Free-tier instances must register with the Arolo Customer Portal within 3 months of installation. After that window, an unregistered instance enters the same read-only period described above: collection stops, but the API keeps serving historical Snapshots and configuration so dashboards stay alive. Register the instance to resume collecting — see Registering with the Customer Portal.

Next

With the free tier (or your paid license) in place, head to First Collection to bring up your first device.