1. Introduction
If you use the 
Checkmk Enterprise Standard Edition or the 
Checkmk Enterprise Managed Services Edition, you perform a license audit at least once a year, i.e. you create an overview of the licenses used by your company and pass it on to tribe29 or the tribe29 partner supporting you.
While Checkmk can’t do this administrative work for you entirely, it can make the process a lot easier.
Checkmk collects the current service numbers for all connected sites at a random time every day. These are then displayed clearly and transparently in the license usage view.
Checkmk stores this information continuously for a period of 400 days, but never transmits it automatically. Older data is removed.
A Checkmk administrator can download the license information and then manually upload it to the tribe29 customer portal. A convenient alternative is to have Checkmk submit the information directly to tribe29’s customer portal. In any case, you retain full control over the data transfer and the transferred content.
2. Using license management
2.1. Entering subscription data
As a Checkmk user with administrator rights open Setup > Maintenance > License usage. This page will be empty as long as no subscription data has been stored.
Use the Edit subscription settings button to open the page with this same name:
Now enter the start and end dates for your current subscription period in the corresponding fields in the Subscription details section. Below that, select one of the default subscription values. Alternatively, you can use the Custom limit selection to enter your own value if the one that applies to your environment is not provided.
If you want to use the direct transmission of license information function, fill in the second section Customer portal credentials with your user name and password for the Checkmk customer portal.
2.2. Displaying license information
Checkmk will now start to display the license related information in the form of a colored diagram.
When license management has been running for a while, you will see a graph of this type:
Based on the various colored elements, you will be able to understand the following:
The red line shows the license limit currently entered in the Subscription details. This makes it easy to see if the number of services has been exceeded.
The light blue line shows the average number of services per month. This smoothes out peaks caused by a misconfiguration, for example.
The dark blue line shows for each day the total number of monitored services across all connected sites.
The green column shows the average number of services in the current month.
The yellow column shows the first month in which the license limit has been exceeded.
The purple column shows the month with the highest license overrun.
In a table below the graph, i.e. below the section shown above, the most recent license survey cases are listed individually.
3. Sending license information to tribe29
As a Checkmk Enterprise Standard Edition or Checkmk Enterprise Managed Services Edition user, you can either submit your license information manually or let Checkmk do most of the work.
Your license information is transparent to you at all times. The information you see on the License usage and Edit subscription settings pages will be used, as well as a comment added on the Submit or download license usage report page, if applicable.
3.1. Manual transmission
You can download your license information directly from your monitoring, and then manually upload it to the tribe29 customer portal.
To do this, open Setup > Maintenance > License usage.
Then click on the 
Submit or download button.
This will take you to the Submit or download license usage report page.
With the 
Download report button, after specifying the desired path, start downloading the archive (a zipped tar archive).
This archive will include a JSON file that contains all of the license information that you see on the License usage page.
Now exit Checkmk and go to the Checkmk customer portal. Log in there with your user credentials to access the menu for uploading the license information. Select License Audit in the left sidebar.
The License Audit Upload window will open, into which you drag-and-drop the license information file into the gray field. Alternatively, click in this field to open a browser window for selecting the file.
Enter your password and start the file transfer by clicking the Upload license audit button. A successful upload will be confirmed at completion.
3.2. Direct transmission by Checkmk
To simplify your work even more, you can predefine the transmission of the license information. This can be accomplished directly from Checkmk with just a few clicks.
Note: Your access data for the tribe29 customer portal must have been stored in Checkmk before the first transmission (see Entering subscription data).
On the Submit or download license usage report page, use the Submit report button.
Your license information will then be transferred directly to your account area of the tribe29 customer portal and you will receive a corresponding confirmation.
The file transferred here is identical to the one you receive when downloading manually.
3.3. Supplementary information for tribe29 partners
As a tribe29 partner you can not only report your own license information easily and quickly to tribe29, but also the license information from your customers. The direct transmission of the customer-related information corresponds exactly to the procedure described above. Only for the manual transmission are there some minor differences.
If you have direct access to Checkmk at your customer’s site, create the license information file as described in the Manual transmission section.
If you do not have direct access to Checkmk at your customer’s site, ask them to download it for you locally and send the resulting file to you.
Afterwards log in to the Checkmk customer portal with your access data (additional options are available to tribe29 partners here). Select Resold licenses in the menu on the left sidebar.
The Resold Licenses window will open.
Click the 
button in the line for the corresponding Checkmk customer.
Then, analogous to the procedure described above, define the license information file and start uploading the file by clicking the Upload license audit button. The successful upload is finally confirmed.